This paper draws the attention to the use of urban land use as a promising and new playground for urban green space design, including viable small-scale agricultural activities. First, an overview of urban green space planning is given, followed by a typology of approaches to evaluate urban green space. Next, the specific importance of urban green space for small-scale agriculture and horticulture is highlighted. The paper concludes with an elaboration of the rich multi-tasking performance of urban green space for a modern urbanized society.

Socioeconomic growth and urban change have been an increasing concern for decision makers in recent decades

Abstract:The purpose of this paper is to point out some of the main characteristics and critical factors for success that can substantiate the proposal of a differentiation framework for maritime clusters. We conduct a benchmarking analysis intended to distinguish the most relevant aspects which can or should be observed in these types of clusters, applied to the following countries: Spain (Basque Country), Germany (Lander of Schleswig-Holstein), the Netherlands and Norway. The differentiation factors involve agglomeration economies and endogenous conditions derived from geographic proximity, essential for lowering transaction costs, strengthening the leverage of public/private cooperation through centres of maritime excellence, at the same time providing an adequate local environment that favours positive interactions between the different maritime industries and actors. The main results arising from this article are presented through a reconceptualisation of Porter's Diamond framework for diagnosing the competitiveness of maritime clusters.

The modern growth literature pays much attention to innovation and knowledge as drivers of endogenous developments in a competitive open economic system. This paper reviews concisely the literature in this field and addresses in particular micro-and macro-economic interactions at local or regional levels, based on clustering and networking principles, in which sustainability conditions also play a core role. The paper then develops a so-called knowledge circuit model comprising the relevant stakeholders, which aims to offer a novel framework for applied policy research at the meso-economic level.

The goal of this work is to detect the basic characteristics of the development of the southern border between Spain and Portugal.This trans-border area is described and analyzed comparing the region of Algarve, in The conclusions show that those indicators related to national governance systems are of utmost importance in the cluster classification. Furthermore, those municipalities with higher development levels are also less sustainable from the environmental point of viewthis is probably due to the fact that tourism supports the fragile socio-economic systems in many of such regions. Significantly, the clustering tendencies show that the Portuguese municipalities are tourism oriented (or less tourism oriented) and the Spanish ones are agribusiness (or less agribusiness oriented). Lastly, such geographic structures seem to have its roots in long term paths of development.

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This paper suggests a new methodology capable of accessing in detail the contribution of companies to countries' sustainability related to economic performance. The concept of sustainability has been brought up in several debates, leading to a clearer understanding of its progress in recent decades. The most adequate indicators to achieve a unique value to define sustainability have been identified. However, specific behaviors of economic agents such as exist in particularly large organizations, have rarely been exposed and evaluated regarding their positive or negative contribution to the increase of sustainability throughout the world. This paper proposes an integrated approach incorporating an evaluation of the positive and negative contributions to sustainability by means of a logistic biplot application. This allows the creation of a summarized index that combines all single sustainability indicators. These synthetic indices allow the positioning of each of the companies in a geometric representation for an original exploration of the sustainability paradigm. The supplied method permits accessing and evaluating information concerning specific behaviors of economic agents such as big companies. In our paper, we have followed the engagements towards sustainability of big corporations, individually or as groups, across the different activity sectors in Portugal and Spain. OPEN ACCESSSystems 2015, 3 7