Planning for the Wild–Urban Interface

This paper contributes to scholarly debates on urbanisation and environmental change with respect to the wildland–urban interface and heat-induced weather and climate conditions, namely compound drought and heat waves, conducive to extreme wildfire events of relevance to the Mediterranean-type climate regions of Africa, Australia, Europe, North and South America. The study site is the wildland–urban interface in the Regional Unit of East Attica, Greece, where an extreme wildfire event took place on 23 July 2018. The paper deals with supply-side drivers of urbanisation by analysing the ‘Special Urban Plan’ for that area (2020–2021) from a broader land policy perspective concerning the delimitation of forest land under the completion of the national land registry by 2024. This ‘Special Urban Plan’, commissioned to the Technical Chamber of Greece by the Ministry of the Environment and Energy, is the first planning instrument of its kind to incorporate measures for fire protection in relation to climate change, climate and weather extremes, and related disasters, and will be a benchmark for other wildland–urban interfaces in Greece. The paper brings front and centre the role of planning in development rights allocation to dissect how the small to medium scale alterations, adjusted to the pre-existing settlement pattern that this ‘Special Urban Plan’ promulgates, position climate action in the property development patterns in Greece. The analytical framework brings together scholarly literature on remote sensing and geospatial analysis, and urbanisation in Southern Europe, drawing respectively upon the works of Wentz and colleagues (2018) on the multidimensional analysis of urban form, and Chorianopoulos and Pagonis (2020) on urbanisation in Attica. The data used are the official texts and maps of the ‘Special Urban Plan’, and related legal texts, which are publicly available online from the Directorate of Planning for Metropolitan, Urban and Peri-urban Areas of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy, the Official Government Gazette, and the Council of State (the Supreme Administrative Court of Greece). The research is generally applicable to the theoretical and empirical investigation of climate action in land policy, planning, and property development.