About the Kick-of-Event: 

This special session marks the inaugural event of a newly established RSA Research Network (RSA Research Network on Bridging Governance Gaps in City-Regions: Addressing Land Take and City-Region Building Through Comparative Research) and offers a unique opportunity to engage in a broader collaborative agenda over the next three years.

While global policy goals like SDG 11 emphasize sustainable urban development, the most tangible indicator of these ambitions—land take—extends far beyond core cities. It is deeply embedded in the socio-economic dynamics of functionally integrated city-regions, reaching into their suburban and even peripheral areas. Consequently, the realization of “no net land take” as a planning and policy goal is not a challenge for individual municipalities but for city-regions as a whole. Yet, institutional fragmentation and conceptual limitations continue to weaken city-regions as coherent spaces for action. These mismatches between functional interdependencies, planning frameworks, and political geographies undermine sustainability ambitions and call for renewed academic attention.

Session Organisers: 

Anna Growe, Kassel University, Germany
Eva Purkarthofer, Aalto University, Finland

The special session covers two perspectives:

• Focus on Governance and Imaginaries
• Focus on Net-Land-Take and Urban-Rural Interrelations