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Allotment gardens have played a significant role in Czech and Slovak society for decades, building upon a rich history of gardening. This article elaborates on Czech and Slovak allotments in the European context and identifies their core functions, services, and benefits. We provide a thorough historical review of allotments in this region, reaching back to the eighteenth century to trace significant periods and historic events that shaped society in general and urban gardening in particular. We analyze the development of allotments until and after 1989 and illustrate key aspects of their present situation using case studies and examples. The article provides a complex historical narrative as a good basis for discussions on contemporary trends, challenges, and visions for the future of urban allotment gardening in both countries.

The environment of a city is influenced by global and local climate changes, pollution load from transport, industry and local heat sources. Green spaces as part of the urban green infrastructure fulfil multiple ecosystem services and improve the environmental and residential quality of a city. The level of positive effects of green spaces depends on their area, distribution within the city and the proportion of trees. The aim of the paper was to evaluate land cover structure in a selected segment of the housing estate Klokočina in Nitra, Slovakia. The evaluation focused on the share of biologically active and inactive surfaces, as well as the parameters of woody plant structure in green spaces. Green areas account for 58.70%, while built-up areas, parking lots and roads cover in total 41.30%. Biologically inactive anthropogenic horizontal and of building envelope areas represent 67.30%. Biologically active green areas represent 32.70%. The share of areas with tree crown overlap on horizontal areas is 20.82%, other areas are paved surfaces or grassland. We calculated the indices of the quality of green spaces from the individual categories of areas: proportional green area index (PGAI), effective green area index (EGAI) and tree shade index (TSI). The tree species composition consists of 36 deciduous and 11 coniferous tree species, and 20 shrub species. We evaluated the biometric traits of trees as the tree height, crown width, stem girth and tree vitality class (TVC). The correlations between tree traits were statistically tested with a significant result. In the group of biologically active areas of greenery, we propose to increase the proportion of trees, to establish more natural lawns and xerophyte flower beds. In the category of inactive areas, we propose the reconstruction of parking lots to grass paved surfaces.

The EU Water Framework Directive aims to ensure restoration of Europe’s water bodies to “good ecological status” by 2027. Many Member States will struggle to meet this target, with around half of EU river catchments currently reporting below standard water quality. Diffuse pollution from agriculture represents a major pressure, affecting over 90% of river basins. Accumulating evidence shows that recent improvements to agricultural practices are benefiting water quality but in many cases will be insufficient to achieve WFD objectives. There is growing support for land use change to help bridge the gap, with a particular focus on targeted tree planting to intercept and reduce the delivery of diffuse pollutants to water. This form of integrated catchment management offers multiple benefits to society but a significant cost to landowners and managers. New economic instruments, in combination with spatial targeting, need to be developed to ensure cost effective solutions – including tree planting for water benefits - are realised. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are flexible, incentive-based mechanisms that could play an important role in promoting land use change to deliver water quality targets. The PESFOR-W COST Action will consolidate learning from existing woodlands for water PES schemes in Europe and help standardize approaches to evaluating the environmental effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of woodland measures. It will also create a European network through which PES schemes can be facilitated, extended and improved, for example by incorporating other ecosystem services linking with aims of the wider forests-carbon policy nexus.

The woody plant species composition has been evaluated in three cadastral territories of southwestern Slovakia, together in 77 habitats of non-forest woody vegetation (NFWV). A total of 43 tree species have been identified; 8 of them were alien and 5 species were cultural fruit trees. In total 20 shrub species were identified, out of which 3 were alien. Three woody species are classified as invasive according to the law in Slovakia: Acer negundo L., Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle, and Lycium barbarum L. They occurred only in 2, maximum in 4 of the evaluated habitats. The most occurring alien tree species Robinia pseudoacacia L. was generally identified in 58 habitats and in 48 habitats, with an incidence over 40% and dominance index of 70.6. The second most occurring alien tree Populus × canadensis had a dominance index of 8.3. The dominant native trees in NFWV were Acer campestre L., Fraxinus excelsior L., Quercus robur L., Salix fragilis L. with the dominance index of 1–5 only.

The Paper presents analyses of the strategies and projects that have been implemented and realised in landscape architecture, environmental protection, and sustainable design in the chosen cities in Poland and Slovakia. There are several levels of evaluation: the first one is policy approach (which includes strategic documents, conceptions, plans which have been elaborated), the second one is the level of landscape design and sustainability (including architectural competitions and project realisation) and the third one is public participation (involvement of the public in urban planning, bottom-up initiatives, support of the communities). Ten cities in Poland and ten cities in Slovakia have been chosen. (The Paper brings an overview what are the current topics, with a great emphasis on what are the trends in landscape architecture and what are the obstacles, which need to be overcome.

Social behaviour in public spaces has changed over the time and has become attractive to all those involved in designing people's spaces. Communities in different countries in Europe have shown more and more interest and various activities have started to shape the public spaces all round the world. The main objective of the chapter is to review development of the methodologies that have been used to analyse public spaces worldwide and to summarize their requirements and conditions to suggest how they can be applied in order to analyse the relationship between people and spaces, with the aim to boost the active participation of people in design process. The chapter describes the methodologies using ICTs, especially e-participation, mobile technologies, GIS systems, or on the methodologies increasing the attractiveness of the public open spaces for citizens and visitors (laser holograms, QR codes, interactive boards, online and interactive maps, questionnaires and social interaction, etc.). Information technology offers new potentials of citizen participation and provides a communication platform, which suppresses a barrier of nonprofessionalism, allowing for distant contacts and enabling participatory process management. Users, accustomed to communicating through ICT also in public spaces, feel by using this tool more anonymous and less harassed to express their opinion. Not only ICT are important in the 21st century society, but also new ways of social media, which are accessible/open to use for larger group of people. The institutions or municipalities could use them as semiofficial information platform, public open discuss forums or resource of the public initiatives.

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