Today more than ever, urban development pressure, the decline of arable land, the rise in climate uncertainty and the disruption of global supply lines make us aware of the shortcomings of current planning practices. Luxembourg's recent economic and demographic growth has had some pronounced impacts on its landscape. Those have entailed the loss of biological diversity, fragmentation of the landscape, steady urban encroachment into rural areas with an increase in sealed surfaces, degradation of the countryside, and diminution of the quality of life (OECD, 2020). This research proposal AHSL1 operates against this background. It builds upon a scientific and methodological corpus of a PhD study conducted by Ivonne Weichold. It proposes a continuation and refinement of this study carried out in the form of a post-doctoral position. The PhD project itself addressed the future of spatial development in Luxembourg by examining whether the land resource is suitable for certain specific uses and determines the suitability level through one of the most pervasive methodologies of landscape analysis and design: landscape suitability analysis through composite mapping. In particular, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method by Saaty (1990; 2000; Saaty and Vargas, 2012) commonly used in land-use suitability analysis, was utilised in this research. In order to explore the appropriateness of a given tract of land for defined land use, the indicators of soil water holding capacity, erosion, slope, elevation and aspect were used. There were two main reasons for using these indicators in this study. The first is the fact that the indicators used in this study are adequate for determining the areas where vegetative production can be carried out. The second reason is that because the study was not conducted for a particular type of agricultural crop, the use of the parameters of humidity, natural efficiency, pH, salinity and organic substance content were not needed.
However, in order to achieve more precise results, the data basis should be enlarged and adapted on a small scale. Therefore, this research project proposes a refinement and extension of the existing map through four points: