Brown and Gabrys reposition ecological restoration as a problem of social organisation, ownership, authority and value rather than a technical operation performed upon degraded land. Their systematic review identifies four decisive dimensions—community organisation, land ownership, engagement and land values—and shows that ‘community’ cannot function as an undifferentiated category. The theoretical contribution is a socially explicit account of landscape regeneration in which ecological recovery is inseparable from property relations, institutional capacity, knowledge plurality and unequal decision-making power. Methodologically, the authors synthesise eighty-one peer-reviewed cases together with grey literature and web resources, extracting recurring organisational patterns and translating them into a comparative analytical framework. The wider bridge is to political ecology, rural studies and environmental justice: restoration succeeds or fails through the institutional forms that determine who initiates, controls, benefits from and sustains ecological intervention. Landscape regeneration therefore becomes a multi-scalar governance practice rather than a bounded ecological project.
URBANISM MEETS ART