Geographical principles of spatial planning under legal restrictions on land use: a framework for territorial communities in Ukraine

Abstract

The 2020–2021 reform of land-use planning in Ukraine merged urban-planning and land-management documentation into a single instrument – the comprehensive plan of spatial development of a territorial community – and made legal restrictions on land use, together with their regime-forming objects, an obligatory layer of every planning document. Restrictions are, however, still treated in practice as a legal register to be transferred from the cadastre, not as a spatial structure to be designed. The purpose of the study is to substantiate a system of geographical principles under which legal restrictions on land use become an input of spatial-planning decisions rather than an afterthought.

The review integrates the European spatial-planning tradition, land-administration theory (the "toolbox" of interests over land and the Land Administration Domain Model), land-use suitability analysis from McHarg to GIS-based multi-criteria evaluation, and the Ukrainian legal framework after Law No. 711-IX and the Classification of land-use restrictions of 2021. A typology of restrictions by the geometry of the regime-forming object (point, linear, areal, diffuse) and by the mode of the restriction (prohibition, conditional use, obligation) was built and cross-referenced with planning levels. Six geographical principles were derived: territorial integrity of the object of planning; hierarchical nesting of restrictions; regime-forming object as generator of spatial regime; overlay cumulativity; compatibility-based functional zoning; and temporal adaptivity of the restriction layer.

Linear and areal restrictions of environmental origin generate the largest share of restricted territory in Ukrainian communities, and their cumulative overlay, not any single restriction, determines the real development capacity of land. The principle of overlay cumulativity is system-forming. The framework offers a geographical reading of the Classification of 2021 and a procedure for integrating restrictions into the comprehensive plan that is compatible with the requirements of martial-law land regulation and post-war recovery planning.