Interventions and instruments to promote sustainable land use in Europe

Since the first examples of human settlements, land has been subject to transformations. With the industrial revolution and in particular after the Second World War, land transformation has become more intense in terms of overexploitation of natural resources. Only recently, however, have policy and decision makers acknowledged the importance of land as a finite resource. Sustainable development has increasingly become the subject of many studies and a reason for debate, leading to different lines of thought among the various disciplines. This has led to the design and implementation of a great number of sustainable land use practices in many European cities and regions. In fact, it seems that sustainability of land use depends both on the socio-economic processes that trigger spatial development and the effectiveness of the instruments that regulate these processes (Solly et al., 2020). The need for a more sustainable and eco-compatible approach, and the European objective to achieve zero net land take 2050 (Science for Environment Policy, 2016), have been one of the reasons why ESPON launched the pan-European research project SUPER – Sustainable Urbanization and land-use in the European Regions. The project examines, on the one hand, the nature and the structure of urbanization processes and, on the other, it seeks to analyze the degree of success of interventions and instruments aiming at a more sustainable use of land. This contribution presents the results of the project by focusing especially on the content of the SUPER “Guide to Sustainable Urbanisation and Land Use” (Cotella et al., 2020). Thanks to the exploration of more than two hundred examples of urbanization interventions gathered all over Europe, the guide suggests a set of policy recommendations for policy and decision makers in order to address land use in a more sustainable perspective. According to the different objectives and contextual needs, policy and decision makers should focus more on: (i) which intervention (i.e. densification, regeneration, containment, governance and sectoral policies) and (ii) which instrument, should be used (i.e. visions and strategies, rules and legal devices, land use regulations, programmes and projects).