PLUREL - Periurban land use relationships

Introduction

PLUREL – Peri-urban land use relationships aims to develop novel methods, tools and strategies for sustainable land use systems in rural-urban regions. Emphasis is placed on the large peri-urban areas around cities. Peri-urban areas are characterised by high dynamics of landscape change, the intermixing of urban and rural land uses and often conflicting policy agendas.

Goal

A scenario approach has been adopted to explore the sustainability impacts of distinctively different development paths under varying local conditions. “Shock” scenarios such as a dramatic increase of energy prices (“oil shock”) or climate change have been developed for this purpose. Complementary, current strategies for steering land use in peri-urban areas are studied. Six European and one Chinese case study have been chosen.  

Partner and Term

PLUREL is a large integrated research project funded under the 6th RTD framework programme of the European Union. 36 partners from Europe and China participate in the project. The project is funded from 2007 to 2011.

The Chair for Strategic Landscape Planning and Management is involved in the Hangzhou case study, an extremely rapidly urbanising city region in China with approx. four million population. We also coordinate a book project which will synthesise main results from the PLUREL project for practitioners and researchers.