Urban and spatial planning

Satoyama refers to the mosaic of forests, wetlands, rice paddies, and grasslands that historically formed the interface between Japanese villages and wilder terrain, shaped over centuries by small-scale, cyclical land use. Researchers study how these cultural landscapes sustain unusually high biodiversity — partly because the moderate, repeated disturbance of traditional farming creates habitat variety that neither intensive agriculture nor untouched wilderness can replicate — and how that ecological function erodes when rural depopulation or urban expansion breaks the human practices that maintain it. A central challenge is understanding how community participation can be revived or redesigned in contemporary contexts, and whether governance models developed for rural Satoyama can translate to urban fringe areas where land tenure, demographics, and land-use pressures are far more complex. Open questions include how to measure the cultural and spiritual dimensions of these landscapes alongside biodiversity metrics, and how global sustainability frameworks can incorporate place-specific, practice-dependent systems without flattening what makes them work.

Works

105,362

Total citations

63,217

Keywords

Satoyamalandscape conservationtraditional agriculturebiodiversitycommunity participationecosystem management