Unlocking peri-urban planning potential through a landscape lens

Our pressurised landscapes are facing three interlinked global emergencies: climate change, biodiversity decline, and unequal human health and well-being. The policy and planning responses are often designed, delivered, and evaluated in separate silos, set within urban or rural domains, and predicated on economic growth. Such disintegrated approaches fail to recognise the multifunctional potential that peri-urban landscapes might play in addressing these emergencies collectively as they remain essentially overlooked and hidden spaces. This chapter uses two pioneering case study narratives attempting transformative change within green belts in peri-urban landscapes. We develop and use a multidimensional landscape lens involving functions, governance, temporalities, and spatialities to understand and improve peri-urban landscape conceptualisation, opportunities, and challenges. The ensuing discussion identifies a future research agenda for peri-urban landscapes drawing from the common ingredients driving success from our case studies and serves to guide and provoke agendas for future landscape research in the peri-urban.