Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are important components of urban quality of life. Public participation GIS (PPGIS) is widely used to assess and map these services. However, it is often a time-consuming exercise with which only small spatial and temporal scales can be addressed. Assessments based on geolocated, passively crowdsourced data from social media present new opportunities to assess CES through a large amount of available data and for broad spatial and temporal scales. We assess the potential of these two methods to substitute, supplement or complement each other in terms of the qualitative information they provide (i.e., landscape features of interest and CES). We take as a case study seven green and blue open spaces of the city of Haifa (Israel), each presenting different elements of interest in the landscape and degrees of accessibility. Results indicate that the two methods provide unique results and are complementary in many instances. We discuss the representativeness of the social media data, the strength of the two methods with respect to the qualitative information obtained, the specificities related to the urban context and the instances of complementarity. We suggest that crowdsourced social media data should be included in broad, multi-methodological approaches to CES.

Forest fires at the wildland-urban interface are generating increasing losses due to the expansion of cities into adjacent forests. At the same time, urban green open spaces are highly valuable as sources of recreational, educational and aesthetic benefits. Tradeoffs may arise between the desire to preserve peri-urban forests for cultural ecosystem services and the need to manage them to enhance the regulatory capacity of the ecosystem and reduce fire risk. In this paper, we assess cultural services and fire regulating services in the urban forest of the city of Haifa (Israel) using participatory GIS mapping, and we look at tradeoffs between these services. We interviewed intensive users of the green spaces of the city and fire experts regarding the location of these services and preferences about selected vegetation management strategies to reduce fire risk. Green space users promoted the idea of a pristine environment and its conservation, mainly for recreational purposes, while fire experts suggested that vegetation management is needed although this would bring about changes in the landscape. Tradeoffs between cultural and regulating services can thus generate conflicts. We conclude by suggesting ways seemingly opposing objectives can be reconciled to reduce fire risk at wildland-urban interface and in a lasting way.

“Sustainability” has been a prominent goal in environmental planning over the past 30 years, especially in rural regions. Planning scholars and practitioners have contributed to this trend by proposing, developing and implementing frameworks for spatial development that aim to facilitate human economic and social development, while mitigating or even reversing the environmental damage associated to development. A broad diversity of frameworks has been developed, and they have both unique and overlapping features. This work explores the myriad ways in which planners understand sustainability and how they implement it at various spatial scales. Drawing from the theoretical and professional literature and from case studies around the world, we develop a classification system for spatial sustainability frameworks based on three scales of aggregation: typologies (the most general category), models and individual case studies. We develop five axes that define the prominent differences in characteristics of spatial sustainability framework typologies. These are: 1) the “top-down – bottom-up” axis, defining who initiates and maintains the initiative; 2) the “ecology – socio- economic” axis, defining the disciplinary approach that determines relative importance of the various priorities; 3) the “subject-specific – holistic” axis, defining the focal object/s of the initiative; 4) the “local – regional” axis, defining the spatial scale of the initiative; and 5) Urban or open space orientation. We suggest that the axes of comparison can assist communities to define and implement their spatial planning goals, while addressing diverse and sometimes competing interests, and conclude by discussing implications for planners. In particular, sustainability planning can be tailored according to the particularities of the socio-ecological system.

The effectiveness of policies implemented to prevent urban sprawl has been a contentious issue among scholars and practitioners for at least two decades. While disputes range from the ideological to the empirical, regardless of the subject of dispute, participants must bring forth reliable data to buttress their claims. In this study we discuss several sources of complexity inherent in measuring sprawl. We then exhibit how methodological decisions can lead to disparate results regarding the quantification and characterization of sprawl. We do so by employing three GIS-based methods for quantifying the amount and defining the configuration of land-cover change from open to built space in a 350 km² area in central Israel over a five-year period. We then calculate values for a variety of spatial indices commonly associated with urban sprawl. Our results reveal that some urban growth patterns are so robust that multiple methods and indices yield similar results and thus lead to similar conclusions. However, we also note that many divergent and even contradictory results are produced depending on the measurement method used and the index selection.

Demography has a profound impact on politics (Bookman 2002; Teitelbaum 2005). This is all the more so in a country like Israel: a political hotspot where population statistics are wielded as weapons to prop up one’s ideology, to justify a proposed policy or to support a historical theory. From scholarly debate on the biblical period to contemporary election campaign speeches, demography colors political discourse. It is imperative, then, to study population-environment (P-E) interactions in not only an ecological context, but in a sociohistorical context as well.

Problem: Urban growth management policy employs a range of tools to restrain urban sprawl, promote efficient land use, and preserve open space. Yet the efficacy of such policy is widely debated and challenged, necessitating reliable empirical evidence from case studies assessing the historical success (or failure) of such policy.

Purpose: We review Israeli national growth management policy over a 36-year period, recording long-term land development trends in order to assess the efficacy of policy.

Methods: We integrate a historical analysis of qualitative policy data and quantitative performance indicators of urban spatial development for a selected region of the country. We use a suite of spatial variables indicating amount, distribution, and configuration of built space along with other sprawl-relevant statistical data.

Results and conclusions: In the 1970s and 1980s, open space was preserved largely due to agricultural preservation policy, despite demographic and economic growth. During the 1990s, the initiation of growth management policy coincided with a profound proliferation of development and population movement to low-density suburbs. While statistical indicators from the past several years are equivocal, they suggest that policy is encouraging higher-density development and slowing the loss of open space.

Takeaway for practice: Urban growth management policy and its impact must be considered within the historical context in which it was implemented. Changes in land use policy in Israel reflect socioeconomic and political changes; when policy did not adapt to changes in society, the results were undesirable. Today, planning tools (e.g., minimum density limits, population size thresholds, urban growth boundaries, and land use fabrics) strike a balance between top-down planning objectives and bottom-up development pressures. The use of these tools within a statutory, national-level plan helps ensure consistency of implementation across regions.

The term ‘‘urban sprawl’’ is often used as a synonym for undesired low-density or otherwise unplanned urban spatial development. However, the precise definition and its desirability are debated. Remote sensing practitioners can contribute to our understanding of urban spatial development by measuring its spatial characteristics and dynamics and providing the data to planners and policy makers. By extension, such data can assist in defining sprawl and assessing its presence and intensity in a given metropolitan area. In this chapter, we review the extensive literature and controversial debate around the definition of urban sprawl, emphasizing common themes in definitions and those quantifiable spatial characteristics that would be of specific interest to remote sensing practitioners. The chapter shows that sprawl can be described by multiple quantitative measures, but that different sprawl measures may yield conflicting results. As a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon, we suggest that sprawl is best defined for a given case study, and quantified using a range of indicators specially selected to suit the researcher’s definition of sprawl, spatial scale of analysis and specific characteristics of the study site.

This research examines land use change in Israel––an intriguing but understudied setting with regard to population–environment dynamics. While Israel is fairly unique with regard to its combined high levels of economic prosperity and high population growth, this case study has relevance for developed countries and regions (like the south and southwest regions of the USA) which must balance population growth and urban development with open space conservation for ecosystem services and biological diversity. The population–land development relationship is investigated during the period from 1961 to 1995 at three spatial scales: national, regional (six districts), and local (40 localities). There is a positive correlation between population growth and land development rates at the national scale, and while remaining positive, the strength of the relationship varies greatly at regional and local scales. The variation in population–land use dynamics across scales is used to garner insight as to the importance of geography, policy and historical settlement patterns.

There has been a recent proliferation of national land-use policies that emphasize protecting open space and ecosystem integrity. However, countries grappling with internal political conflict, or that are engaged in military conflicts with neighboring countries, have priorities that focus on control of land in areas where state sovereignty is perceived to be threatened. These two concerns, political-demographic control and environmental protection, create very different paradigms for how to think about open space policy. The objective of this paper is to consider the impact of competing paradigms in land-use policy formulation and implementation—one that encourages sprawl and the other that encourages compact development and the preservation of open space. We use Israel as a case study where both political demography and environmental land-use paradigms are currently influencing policy and planning. We explore the historical evolution of both land-use paradigms and consider how they are currently competing in the formulation and execution of land-use policy decisions. We consider how these distinct priorities are playing out in current discourse and policy implementation, and characterize the past, current and prospective future physical outcomes of policies on the landscape. Our goal is to alert policy makers and land-use scholars of the subtle and contradictory influence of political-demographic land-use priorities with regard to their potential impact on the successful implementation of environmental policies. The Israeli case study is indicative of a diversity of countries that have a history of political-demographic land-use policies, but have also begun to adopt environmentally motivated policies.

This article addresses the discourse of Israeli academics, policy makers, and environmental activists regarding the environmental implications of population growth in Israel. While there are compelling reasons that population growth should be a prominent topic for local environmental research and discussion, it is rarely considered in environmental campaigns or in the academic literature. I attribute this to the embeddedness of the Israeli environmental community within wider Israeli society. National ideologies and religiosity, coupled with immediate security and social concerns, bound what is considered “sanctioned” discourse regarding population growth, prescribing the rules of academic engagement for this controversial topic.