CONCEPT FACTSHEET

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Mainly considers SOIL QUANTITY and PERFORMANCE challenges ****

In URBAN, PERI-URBAN and RURAL settings

No Net Land Take (NNLT) Hierarchy: AVOID

Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) Hierarchy: AVOID

Regional planning operates across different scales simultaneously, moving away from a vision that considers settlements as isolated units towards a broader, more comprehensive approach of territories, which acknowledges interdependencies. Regional planning and design guides agriculture, forestry and urban expansion, as well as the management of natural resources, perhaps the most vital elements necessary to sustain a safe and healthy environment for human life (Bauer, 1973).

Soil is one of those fundamental resources, with the ability to enable and constrain what happens above ground. Soil types and their quality determine which activities are appropriate or sustainable in a given area, and in turn, those activities have direct impact on the soils beneath them, either degrading or restoring them.

In this sense, regional planning and design cannot focus solely on what takes place above ground. To guide sustainable development, it must pay close attention to soil types and conditions, with soil mapping and monitoring informing decisions across multiple municipalities or territories.

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Contents

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Definition & Background Information

Regional Planning and Design

With a comprehensive, integrative nature, regional planning and design looks at territories at a “geographical scale that supersedes the city” (Van Dijk, 2023). Its action sphere concerns a scale between the municipal and the national one, for a geographic area that shares common interests and problems, for which decision-making cannot be managed by a single city (Bauer, 1973). Through an encompassing vision, regional planning delineates coordinated strategies for a wide territory, acknowledging the importance of interdependencies at a larger scale (Balz, 2017; Beunen et al., 2023; Van Dijk, 2023).

Although coordinated decision-making at the regional scale has happened for centuries, the origins of the concept of regional planning and design can be traced back to the one of city region, during a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization (Van Dijk, 2023). With cities growing significantly in size, mobility options becoming more accessible for the larger masses, and processes of suburbanization, the need to address territorial planning at a larger scale became evident, and the city region, covering multiple settlements, became a unit of spatial design and analysis, laying the grounds for the emergence of regional planning (Van Dijk, 2023).

Regional planning and design deals with the allocation of new developments, the management of natural and water resources, infrastructure projects, and energy production, among others (Beunen et al., 2023; Van Dijk, 2023). It entails analysing the functioning of landscapes, ecological systems, urban settlements, mobility networks and human activities in a holistic way, and proposing integral solutions that consider their interactions and dependencies across urban, peri-urban, and rural settings (ibid; Healey, 2004). Elements of strategic planning are present in regional planning and design as well: both coordinate planning and policymaking at different scales and among different sectors, giving collaboration a central role in decision-making (Healey, 2004; Mäntysalo, 2023).

Early examples of the application of the regional planning rationale in Europe can be found in concepts that like green belts (famously developed in the London area), green fingers (or wedges), and the green heart (with the Dutch case standing out) (Van Dijk, 2023). All of them, still relevant to this date, deal with the relationship between the built and green environment at a metropolitan scale in different ways: either by containing and limiting the sprawl of the built areas or by finding connections between open land and the built-up. At the urban level, concepts like dormitory town and satellite city, as well as transit-oriented development are examples of how regional planning can operate, considering functional interdependencies at a wider scale. At the landscape level, regional planning deals with concepts such as watershed management, wetland planning, green corridors, ecological networks, and bioregional planning (Hagens, 2010). These examples show how natural systems can also guide regional design, defining territorial relations that are independent from administrative boundaries.

Regional planning has a very high potential for soil inclusivity. Decisions at the regional level have direct impacts on the soil that supports development. Furthermore, guiding agriculture, the management of natural resources, the delineation of infrastructural networks, forestry and urban settlements can be decisive for soil health, and regional design should therefore pay close attention to land take, soil types and their quality to achieve sustainability (Bauer, 1973). Regional planning is thus deeply intertwined with challenges of climate adaptation and biodiversity, and in this context, the emergence of bioregional planning (as well as the implementation of watershed and wetland planning), is timely (World Economic Forum, 2025). These approaches guide decisions by focusing on ecological and natural systems rather than administrative or political limits, promoting context-based planning that take physical and cultural dimensions into account (Perrin, 2020; World Economic Forum, 2025).

Advancing Planning Challenges

The application of this concept can help address the following soil-related planning challenges:

• Urban and rural shrinkage: Redistributing functions towards shrinking areas to revitalise them, reserving degraded or underused land for renaturation.
• Inefficient resource and land use management: By directing development toward areas of lower ecological value while protecting ecologically valuable soils at the regional level, beyond jurisdictional boundaries.
• Water quantity extremes: By managing permeable surfaces and land use across river basins and catchment areas, coordinating soil-based water storage and infiltration.
• Lack of space for energy production: Balancing the demand for energy infrastructure against soil protection priorities across a wide territory, identifying and reserving suitable sites for infrastructure.
• Unequal distribution of energy and material flows: By coordinating infrastructure planning and territorial design, reducing dependencies and vulnerabilities that disadvantaged communities may face.
• Unsustainable mobility and infrastructure: Coordinating settlement patterns and transit corridors, reducing dependence on carbon-intensive and land-consuming transport infrastructure, and protecting soil that would otherwise be converted and sealed for roads and infrastructure.
• Lack of access to healthy food: Protecting agricultural land and soils with high agronomic potential to support local and affordable access to healthy food.

Across Scales & Contexts