Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Global Environmental Change journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha Urban land-use change: The role of strategic spatial planning Anna M. Hersperger a, ⁎ , Eduardo Oliveira a , Sofia Pagliarin a , Gaëtan Palka a , Peter Verburg b , Janine Bolliger a , Simona Grădinaru a a Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Switzerland b Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1085, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Governance External conditions Planning intentions Plan implementation Strategic spatial planning Land-change modelling ABSTRACT To date land-change science has devoted little attention to spatial policy and planning in urban landscapes despite the widely accepted premise that planning affects urban land change. This is primarily due to lack of relevant data and an underdeveloped theoretical understanding regarding the impact of spatial planning on urban land change. To be able to better analyse the role of spatial planning in urban development we need to distinguish: 1) the intentions expressed in the plans; 2) the means of implementation of the plans through governance processes and 3) the role of external conditions influencing implementation. Based on a synthesis of the current literature on how spatial planning is implemented in land-change models, and drawing from the literature on planning evaluation, we sketch a research agenda to further develop the understanding of these three components and their interconnections as well as their application in quantitative land-change modelling approaches for urban regions. 1. Introduction Land change is one of the key processes of global environmental change (Magliocca et al., 2015; Turner II et al., 2007; Verburg et al., 2015). The studies on the topic have gradually advanced from a focus on patterns of land-use and land-cover change to an analysis of dynamic interactions within socio-ecological systems and the resulting impacts on, for example, ecosystem services and biodiversity (Rindfuss et al., 2004; Rounsevell et al., 2012). In this context, land change is under- stood as the result of interacting political/institutional, economic, cul- tural, technological and natural/spatial driving forces and the re- spective actors (Bürgi et al., 2004; Hersperger et al., 2010). Whereas data on economic and natural conditions have a long tradition in being used to explain land changes, researchers only recently started to pay attention to policies, plans, and regulations on land use, within their specific institutional and governmental contexts. Meta-analytical stu- dies have emphasized the role of land-use policies and spatial planning as a major underlying driving factor for many different land-use change processes (van Vliet et al., 2016). Compared with forest and agricultural related research, studies on land change in urban regions are so far a small part of land-system research (Geist et al., 2006; Magliocca et al., 2015; Seto et al., 2011). However, urban regions, which are also broadly defined as cities or metropolitan regions, are some of the most dynamic land-change systems worldwide. With strong further urbanization expected over the coming decades they will cover increasing areas of the earth surface and host the majority of the human population (Seto et al., 2012). At the same time, urban land change is not restricted to the core city, but includes many new urban-rural spaces functionally tied to the city (Brenner and Schmid, 2015) and has many impacts on rural hinterlands (Bren d’Amour et al., 2016) and hence deserves more attention in land- change science (Müller and Munroe, 2014). A widely accepted premise is that, especially in urban regions, spatial planning - a multifaceted activity with many purposes, including project planning, master planning, land-use planning and strategic planning - influences patterns of land use and land cover (Couclelis, 2005). Amongst the many purposes of spatial planning, spatial planners and governments have been trying to steer urbanization processes with the aim of developing sustainable cities and regions (Albrechts et al., 2017; Collier et al., 2013). However, conceptualizing the role of plan- ning in guiding land change is a great challenge (McNeill et al., 2014). This is partly due to the fact that research on the contribution of planning to land change is at the interface of two paradigms (Briassoulis, 2008; Hillier, 2007): planning scholars tend to stress contextuality and social construction of space; whereas land-change scientists incline to assume the existence of realities that can be ob- jectively described and measured and lend themselves to general- izations. The difference between the two paradigms can be illustrated https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.05.001 Received 1 June 2017; Received in revised form 15 March 2018; Accepted 1 May 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Zürcherstrasse 111, 8903, Birmensdorf, Switzerland. E-mail address: anna.hersperger@wsl.ch (A.M. Hersperger). Global Environmental Change 51 (2018) 32–42 0959-3780/ © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/). T