It is nearly 33 years since the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (known in short as the Brundtland Commission) famously defined sustainable development as a process of change in which the “exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development; and insti-tutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations.” During the past 3 decades, global land use changes seem to discredit that expectation by moving in the reverse direction.

Seen from space, the Earth’s land surface is increasingly a mottled landscape made up largely of the built envi-ronment, comprising roads, buildings and industrial farming systems, with only a few islands of non-engineered natural systems.

Cities, which used to be self-contained units surrounded by the vast countryside, now appear to be simply more dense settlements than those that can be seen elsewhere. It therefore seems imperative to blur the distinc-tions across cities, small towns and rural areas and to examine new forms of ‘periurbanisation’ of the so-called hinterland, whose sustainability challenges are vast and growing. This Winter School was an attempt to pick up the pieces around sustainability and land to try to formulate a more integrated view. It covered the following themes:

1 Sustainable development and land

2 Urbanisation and the land-water-food-ecosystems nexus

3 Sustainable governance beyond cities