New Issue Published: Landscape Architecture, Volume 2026, Issue 1
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Volume 113 Issue 2
- Research article
Regime Capability and Repair Priority in European Policy Portfolios for Urban Nature-Based Solutions
by
1College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
- Volume 113 Issue 2
- Pages: 72
- - 90
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231132-05
Today, nature-based solutions in urban environments need to be regarded not only as projects but also as infrastructure for adaptation, restoration, moderation, cooling, public health, and overall quality of life. However, their increasing use relies on policy portfolios that should provide more than mere regulations, funding, or guidance documents. Rather, they have to build at least some level of capability within a broad set of institutional, economic, technical, cultural, and delivery conditions within which urban infrastructure is planned, built, financed, maintained, and valued. In this article, we introduce Regime-Capability Readiness Assessments for seven European case studies: European Union, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Our approach converts policy-instrument codes into four capability states – from vacant to anchored and then combines these indicators based on three metrics: sufficiency of instrument families, capped regime saturation, and bottlenecks protection. Consequently, the developed Implementation-Readiness and Repair Index provides information on how close each portfolio is to being capable of sustaining routine nature-based implementation. The European Union demonstrates the highest score, 96.6, due to sufficiency of all instrument families and absence of any vacuum or fragility in its regime dimensions. While Germany possesses strong capacity of policy making, it suffers in its implementation readiness due to the lack of functioning industry-network and physical technology elements. The United Kingdom and Sweden find themselves in an intermediate position with their distinctive needs for repair: Sweden lacks economic and usage practice capabilities, while the United Kingdom requires financial and funding repairs. Despite retaining strong knowledge base, the Netherlands still require further development. Finally, both Spain and Hungary require further strengthening of foundational elements. It turns out that capacity assessment should always consider the issue of capability development.
- Research article
by
1Senior Advisor in Environmental Planning and Conservation Global Landscape Policy Institute United Kingdom
- Volume 113 Issue 2
- Pages: 56
- - 71
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231132-04
In recent years, informal urban green spaces have come to be seen as assets for ecology and society alike amid dense, stratified and climatically vulnerable cityscapes. Ecological and social planning rationales behind informal urban green space may involve habitat conservation, cooling, stormwater management, recreation, aesthetics, and production; however, these rationales are differently well founded depending on the specific nature of the space, which includes brownfields, vacant land or lots, wastelands, urban wildness, spontaneous vegetation, and even the label of informal green space itself. This paper investigates whether the ecological services associated with each category rest on empirical support for the interactions among them. An existing inventory of 112 academic publications addressing informal green-space ecosystem services was parsed out in terms of service load, ecological-retention share, direct-contact share, multi-service treatment, intervention exposure, interaction-audit coverage, and potential-use liability. It turns out that vacant land and lots carry the greatest potential-use liability in the amount of 50.6 due to their future-oriented focus coupled with just 4.2% interaction-audit coverage. Multi-service treatment among brownfields is relatively defensible at 75.8%, as much as the interaction-audit coverage is at 24.0%, yet the vast majority of the brownfield papers do not consider service interaction. Informal green spaces are least exposed to liability due to its descriptive nature rather than being a physically changing target. Wastelands exhibit the largest share of ecological retention in 77.9%, and neither urban wildness nor spontaneous vegetation papers contain any data on interaction audit coverage.
Call for Papers
Landscape Architecture invites submissions for Volume 2026, Issue 3, scheduled for publication in September 2026. The journal welcomes high-quality scholarly contributions that advance research, theory, criticism, and applied knowledge in landscape architecture and related fields.