Anna M Hersperger

Biographic Data

ID227045
NAMEAnna M Hersperger
GIVEN NAMESAnna M
FAMILY NAMEHersperger
SIGNATUREHERSPERGER A M
AFFILIATIONSSwiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research
ORCID0000-0001-5407-533X
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS47
TOTAL CITATIONS259
AUTHOR COUNT47
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2004
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX8

  • Toward policy-informed 3D urban land-use simulations by leveraging urban planning regulations

    Open AccessSomaie Abolhasani, Rafael Ramírez Eudave et al.ARTICLELand Use Policy2026

  • Implementing the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) Approach

    Open AccessRafael Ramírez Eudave, Anna M HerspergerARTICLEThe Historic Environment Policy &…2026

    The adoption of the historic urban landscape (HUL) approach to bridging cultural heritage and urban management practice has been facilitated by the dissemination of implementation experiences in scientific and grey literature. While the Swiss legal framework for historic sites resonates with the HUL approach, the extent to which practice reflects its six steps, a set of strategies designed to inform local action, remains unclear. This study exami…

  • Digital permeation of urban planning practice

    Open AccessAnna M Hersperger, Somaie Abolhasani et al.ARTICLECities2026

    The field of urban planning is currently undergoing a profound transformation driven by digital technologies. These are increasingly used to support and automate the planning process, and have the potential to reshape the nature of planning itself and impact the core planning values of equity, transparency, efficiency, and legitimacy. One pressing issue is the growing use of standards, not only in data formats, but also in the categories that des…

  • Scrutinising European land-use planning

    Open AccessDaniels Saakjans, Dorothy Kaufmann et al.ARTICLELand Use Policy2026Cited by: 1References: 26

    ISSN:0264-8377

  • Identification of land-use conflicts

    Aibo Sun, Yunlong Gong et al.ARTICLEJournal of Environmental Planning…2025

    Divergent perspectives on future land-use changes, known as land-use conflicts (LUCs), significantly affect the local environment, human well-being, and sustainable development goals. However, the accurate identification and resolution of LUCs remain challenging. This study proposed a framework for LUC identification by integrating the land characteristics obtained from expert analyses with local stakeholder preferences. It outlined four types of…

  • Planning open and green spaces in Europe

    Open AccessDaniels Saakjans, Simona R Grădinaru et al.ARTICLELandscape and Urban Planning2025

  • A conformance-based framework to evaluate the National Urban Agenda's impact on urban sustainable development in Brazil

    Open AccessAna Beatriz Pierri-Daunt, Darío Domingo et al.ARTICLELand Use Policy2025Cited by: 1References: 41

    Although national urban policies are implemented to steer urbanization processes, the systematic evaluation of these measures continues to pose a methodological challenge. We developed an innovative methodology for assessing policy outcomes based on a multi-dimensional set of indicators considering socio-economic and land change factors and applied it to Brazil. We evaluated the conformance of urban change with two cornerstone policies of Brazil'…

  • How do planning intentions spatiotemporally drive 3-D urban growth

    Open AccessChunhong Zhao, Zhichao He et al.ARTICLEHabitat International2025Cited by: 1References: 53

    Spatial planning is conducive to guiding urban growth to efficiently achieve urban sustainability. However, assessing the causal effects of planning practices on three-dimensional (3-D) urban growth at the local level is empirically challenging. In this study, Austin, Texas was selected to evaluate the causal effects of plans on the 3-D urban growth, measured by impervious surface fraction, building surface fraction, and building height. The prop…

  • Governing urban regions with a network of plans

    Open AccessAnna M Hersperger, Gian-Claudia Sciara et al.ARTICLECities2024Cited by: 1References: 29

    As our environment becomes increasingly urban, the governance of urban regions faces multifaceted challenges. There is growing recognition that studying the governance of urban regions requires looking beyond individual plans and examining networks of plans. Existing work on plan networks focuses on documents, neglecting the agency of the people and governments who create and implement the plans. To help fill this gap, we develop and test an anal…

  • Assessing public opinion using self-organizing maps. Lessons from urban planning in Romania

    Open AccessAndreea Raluca Slave, Ioan Cristian Ioja et al.ARTICLELandscape and Urban Planning2023

  • Long-term changes in 3D urban form in four Spanish cities

    Open AccessDarío Domingo, Jasper van Vliet et al.ARTICLELandscape and Urban Planning2023

  • Peer effects drive non-conformance between built-up land expansion and zoning

    Open AccessZhichao He, Zhaowu Yu et al.ARTICLEApplied Geography2023

  • Digitalization in land-use planning

    Anna M Hersperger, Corina Thurnheer-Wittenwiler et al.ARTICLEEuropean Planning Studies2022

    Digital transformation is shaping our lives and altering planning. Digitalization is closely linked to smart governance, through which administrative units such as cities and regions increasingly offer digital services related to spatial planning. However, the increasing digitalization of spatial planning has received little attention in academic planning literature, and few studies have analysed how digitalization affects planning practice. The …

  • Does zoning contain built-up land expansion? Causal evidence from Zhangzhou City, China

    Open AccessZhichao He, Yuheng Ling et al.ARTICLELandscape and Urban Planning2022

    The increasing impacts of built-up land expansion on sustainable development have heightened the use of spatial planning as a policy tool to contain built-up land expansion. However, causal evidence for the effect of spatial planning on built-up land expansion has largely remained unexplored. In this study, we used a difference-in-difference model with propensity score matching to estimate the average and annual effect of built-up land zoning (su…

  • An indicator-based sustainability assessment method for indigenous communities

    Open AccessJessica Molina Maturano, Luz A García Serrano et al.ARTICLEEnvironment Development and…2022

    Indigenous and Western communities are faced with increasing issues of sustainability compromising their natural resources and cultural heritage, for example, a cross-pollination/complementary approach in relation to their current knowledge systems and discourses on sustainability. There is a need for methods that integrate different discourses relating to sustainability to identify the most pressing needs in terms of sustainability. Sustainabili…

  • Integrating biodiversity

    Open AccessUeli Reber, Manuel Fischer et al.ARTICLEPolicy Sciences2022Cited by: 4References: 22

    The effective conservation and promotion of biodiversity requires its integration into a wide range of sectoral policies. For this to happen, the issue must receive attention across policy sectors. Yet, we know little about how attention to the issue evolves over time and across sectors. Drawing from the literature on environmental policy integration/mainstreaming and policy process theories, we develop competing hypotheses, expecting either incr…

  • The compliance of land-use planning with strategic spatial planning – insights from Zurich, Switzerland

    Franziska B Schmid, Felix Kienast et al.ARTICLEEuropean Planning Studies2021

    Although many planning systems are based on a combination of traditional land-use planning and strategic spatial planning, the interplay between the two approaches remains insufficiently investigated. Focusing on the Canton of Zurich, we applied a qualitative content analysis to extract strategic planning intentions from the Cantonal Structure Plan (1995). We quantitatively analysed the compliance of changes in municipal land-use plans between 19…

  • Strategic spatial planning and efficacy

    Gaëtan Palka, Eduardo Oliveira et al.ARTICLEEuropean Planning Studies2021

    Strategic spatial planning has been a key planning practice at the urban regional level to support the implementation of local spatial transformations. Previously, qualitative comparative research has revealed the complexity that characterizes strategic spatial planning processes; it is multi-faceted, highly context-dependent and embedded in multi-level governance configurations. However, to date, little effort has been made to quantitatively eva…

  • Digital plans and plan data in planning support science

    Open AccessAnna M Hersperger, Christian FertnerARTICLEEnvironment and Planning B Urban…2021

    While we support the idea that the research field of planning support systems should develop into a planning support science, we note that in the current debate the rapidly progressing digitization in spatial planning practice is insufficiently taken into account. In particular, digital plans and plan data are not mentioned in Geertman and Stillwell’s paper. This is likely caused by the fact that the authors narrowly focus on collaborative planni…

  • Effect of zoning plans on urban land-use change

    Open AccessDarío Domingo, Gaëtan Palka et al.ARTICLESustainable Cities and Society2021

    Even though urban land-use change simulations provide useful information for decision makers, planning is generally weakly integrated into land-change modelling. However, the increasingly digitally available zoning data from statutory planning offers new opportunities. This study aims to reveal the potential effectiveness of statutory planning in terms of sustainable urban development by integrating zoning regulations in a multi-scenario simulati…

  • Closer to causality

    Open AccessZhichao He, Chunhong Zhao et al.ARTICLELand Use Policy2021Cited by: 7References: 65

    Spatial planning has been globally developed as a policy tool to govern built-up land expansion. However, causal evidence of the effect of spatial planning on built-up land expansion is limited, which raises doubts on the credibility of spatial planning and hinders theoretical developments in land-system science. We evaluated the effect of the Major Function Oriented Zone (MFOZ), the first strategic spatial plan in China, on built-up land expansi…

  • The role of spatial planning in land change

    Open AccessAna Beatriz Pierri-Daunt, Ana Beatriz Pierri Daunt et al.ARTICLELand Use Policy2021Cited by: 2References: 36

    Urban expansion is expected to continue at a fast rate, precisely in peri-urban areas of developing countries surrounded by biodiversity hotspots. The need to assess and potentially restructure urban and environmental planning instruments becomes apparent in scenarios where urban expansion is difficult to manage. Indicators based on spatially explicit datasets have been suggested as effective tools to evaluate spatial planning outcomes because th…

  • Urban expansion and forest reserves

    Open AccessAna Beatriz Pierri-Daunt, Ana Beatriz Pierri Daunt et al.ARTICLELand Use Policy2021Cited by: 5References: 36

    Landscapes changes are a result of a wide range of interactions between actors and driving forces (DFs). In this study, we quantify the contribution of different types of DFs to processes of land change in the Northern Coast of São Paulo State (NCSP), Brazil, an important region for tourism and the energy sector. We analysed the relationship between DFs and the processes of land change from 1985 to 2000 and from 2000 to 2015 with partial least sq…

  • Does landscape play a role in strategic spatial planning of European urban regions

    Open AccessAnna M Hersperger, Matthias Bürgi et al.ARTICLELandscape and Urban Planning2020

  • Characterizing the 3-D urban morphology transformation to understand urban-form dynamics

    Open AccessChunhong Zhao, Qihao Weng et al.ARTICLELandscape and Urban Planning2020