In recent decades, there has been considerable debate in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona regarding the role of spatial planning in influencing general land-use trends. There is a widespread belief amongst geographers, environmentalists, planners and some politicians that spatial planning of the metropolitan region has not been particularly successful in reducing urban pressures on rural areas. The aim of this study is to explore the apparent links between urban sprawl, spatial planning and changing land use in the rural-urban fringe of Barcelona. The paper demonstrates that the main impacts of sprawl have been concentrated in agricultural areas, and that the planning system has not been capable of containing urban growth.

a b s t r a c tThere has been a growing literature on alternative food networks (AFNs); structures that reconfigure the systems of production, distribution and consumption of food. Part of this literature emphasises the local scale and the idea of proximity. In a world that is increasingly urban, AFNs at a local scale can be more easily developed by linking peri-urban farmlands and cities. However, agriculture in the rural-urban fringe struggles to survive in the face of urban pressures and sprawl; a process which undermines viable agricultural production in the city's countryside. A widely used strategy to address these pressures has been farmland protection, undertaken in different ways depending on the legal framework of particular countries. This paper considers farmland conservation and AFNs development issues through a casestudy of the Baix Llobregat Agricultural Park (BLAP) in metropolitan Barcelona. It concludes that AFNs in peri-urban areas are only possible if farmland preservation is guaranteed, and that the former does not come as a direct consequence of the latter. The specific conditions in which both can occur will be of interest for scholars as well as policy-makers and planners.

This research compares two location-based methods of evaluating public transport accessibility and applies them in Helsinki. After discussing a series of methodological aspects, the authors calculate the Structural Accessibility Layer (SAL) public transport indicator and the Public Transport and Walking Accessibility Index (PTWAI) for a grid with 8,325 zones, comparable in size to the smallest census unit. Both methods are operational for urban planners and policy makers interested in a relatively straightforward way of quantifying the accessibility of sustainable transport modes such as public transport. The results display similar accessibility patterns when moving from larger to smaller isochrones (60 to 38 min). However, the findings are inconclusive between SAL and PTWAI: SAL (38 min) displays good accessibility by public transport (more than 94 % of the population living within two-thirds of the metropolitan area has very high and high access to public transport), but PTWAI indicates that 35 % of the population, primarily households with children (43 %), experience low and very low access. The contrasting results are mainly due to the derivation of the two indicators and have considerable implications for policy making. The findings of this research imply that PTWAI is preferable to planning assessments regarding public transport, given its relatively richer content. However, for multi-mode-based accessibility categorization, SAL appears more appropriate. It is the analyst's role to understand the objective and contents of each index and choose the tool fit for their purpose. Then, a judgement should be made on the trade-off between the Appl. Spatial Analysis (2017)

a b s t r a c tAirport capacity continues to be one of the air transport issues that creates the most concern. The major environmental constraint for airports is the noise generated by aircraft. Annoyed communities living around airports have become a limiting factor for airport capacity and operability. This paper brings together the existing literature in the fields of airport environmental capacity, non-acoustic factors of noise annoyance, NIMBYism and environmental conflicts. We also analyze the socio-environmental conflict between Barcelona airport and the community of Gavà Mar. This case shows that the lack of trust between parties, the impossibility of predicting noise exposure, the absence of opportunities for civil society to speak and the difficulty of accessing relevant information foster annoyance and mobilization in the communities that live around the airport. In addition, it is shown that, in such a situation, communities' reactions can evolve to a post-NIMBY stage in which proactive attitudes replace reactive ones.

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