Negative trends in land use and land cover changes (LULCCs) are embodied in environmental, economic and social problems, keeping entire societies away from sustainable development goals (SDGs). This recognition incites a need for securing comprehensive and transdiciplinary knowledge on the complex interplay between LULCCs and their drivers. It should inform land use policy makers and produce adequate sustainable social responses. However, fragmentation in both academic and governmental arenas is an important impediment to the needed application of sustainability to land use policy. With this regard, the study offers a transdisciplinary, bottom-up and reproducible framework for understanding key drivers of LULCCs at the national/regional level where sustainable land use policies should be defined. Its main component is the repeated measure ANOVA of the experts’ survey data. The analysis allows aggregation of experts’ different disciplinary, professional and experiential perceptions and produces comparable results. It is tested in Serbia in three sub-periods during post-socialism. Main results confirm that LULCCs and drivers are complexly intertwined and need to be analysed within a comprehensive and transdisciplinary framework. Furthermore, the study should enable the transdisciplinary discussion, learning and knowledge coproduction that are required to inform land use policy makers about the needed trans-sectoral coproduction of policy responses towards SDGs.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, the spatial planning system in Serbia underwent a significant transformation following the general trends of change in Serbia. The neoliberal-market model of the economy has directly led to the apparent suppression of social services and of the environmental sector. After 2010, the formerly hierarchical organised system slowly began to marginalise national, regional and local planning. Instead of that, planning of special purpose areas became dominant and almost ubiquitous. This plan, according to the Law, can cover all types of infrastructure, all types of mining, tourist facilities and areas, energy, protected nature objects and cultural and historical monuments, as well as the so-called Belgrade Waterfront and the National Stadium. The paper analyses the causal relationships that have led to the current state of planning, given the systematisation of spatial plans of the special purpose areas so far prepared. Additionally, the paper also discusses the effectiveness of such a partial approach to the field of spatial planning and landscaping in Serbia.

This essay is dedicated to the old topic of the influence of politics on spatial planning. Planning is and has always been a state policy instrument in space and as such it is inevitably linked to the ideologies, interests and priorities of political structures. Under the circumstances of rapidly changing political parameters, both in Serbia and in the world, it is becoming increasingly difficult for planning to keep pace, especially when it comes to the long-term and relative stability of politics in space, which is a requirement for good planning in general. This is certainly not helped by the statements that the market is more important than the plan and that in the neoliberal concept spatial planning must not become a so-called business barrier. As a result of the explicit interest of political power in spatial development in Serbia in the first two decades of the 21st century, there has been an excessive politicisation of planning. It is enough to mention the recent examples of spatial plans for special purpose areas for the Belgrade Waterfront, Rio Tinto and the Spatial Plan of the Republic of Serbia, regardless of the quality of the planning solutions. In public discourse, planning is often labelled as risky, impossible, impotent, malicious and even unconstitutional. On the other hand, there is an opinion that spatial planning is alive and well and that it takes place according to the circumstances. The hypothesis that is further developed in the essay is that in order to remain effective in a changing political environment, spatial planning must become more pragmatic and, what is not new, must sometimes save space from political visions with the quality of planning solutions.

The dichotomy between the rational and incremental models in planning theory is well known, that is their positioning on opposite sides of the spectrum of possible spatial planning approaches. it is also well recognized that the beginnings and the golden era of planning in Serbia and Yugoslavia were closely linked to the rational approach, the pyramid of plans and the systematic and careful separation of planning and project. With the radical change of the system, the planning approach also changed radically. The pyramid of plans collapsed, rational planning, which had by then evolved into strategic planning, remained at the national and regional level, but local planning became what incrementalism truly means: improvisation from case to case or muddling through. The parcel becomes the predominant theme of almost all plans and overtake any thought of a strategic approach to both plan making and public discussions. The main planning topics in public discourse are legalisation, parcelling, expropriation, land use change and location information. Although many experts argue that planning must adapt to the new market and investor-dominated conditions in order to survive, the decline of strategic thinking in spatial development planning, especially at the local level, is a cause for concern. in addition to observations on the current practice of planning at the local level in Serbia, the paper attempts to discuss the possibility that the above-aforementioned incrementalism could evolve into a more advanced form of planning that would be acceptable and less rigid for the public, authorities, and planners alike.

Large-scale brownfields represent the most visible category of brownfields in the territory of the Republic of Srpska. The existence of these locations with an area of over 4 hectares and a previous period of inactivity of at least 6 months indicates negative socio-economic processes that lead to underutilization and/or dereliction of certain parts of the territory of the Republic of Srpska, often accompanied by environmental pollution from the past. These are predominantly industrial complexes, and there are also military and infrastructure sites. This research is based on the main author's doctoral dissertation on large-scale brownfields in the Republic of Srpska from 2016, where the time frame for identifying this spatial phenomenon was set at 31 Decembar 2013. By comparing the results of the new identification of large-scale brownfields in the Republic of Srpska after 10 years, trends in the dynamics of the development of this phenomenon will be clearly observed. Based on this research, the basic hypothesis will be proven that there is a process of decline in the number of large-scale brownfields in the territory of the Republic of Srpska, caused by the reduced influence of the transition process as the main factor in the creation of large-scale brown-fields in the territory of the Republic of Srpska.