Urban Cemeteries as Contested Land-Use Systems: A Scoping Review of Planning Tensions and Responses

Urban cemeteries are essential yet spatially durable forms of civic infrastructure that increasingly accommodate ecological, cultural, heritage, and public-space functions alongside burial and mourning. This scoping review examines urban cemeteries as contested land-use systems in which infrastructural, environmental, and socio-cultural claims intersect and compete. A Web of Science search supplemented by citation tracking identified 112 peer-reviewed studies published during January 2010–April 2026. The literature was organized across three analytical domains—infrastructure and governance, environment and ecology, and society and culture—and synthesized in terms of planning tensions and responses. The findings reveal recurring tensions between burial capacity and perpetuity, ecological potential and environmental or managerial constraints, and expanded public use and expectations of solemnity, cultural recognition, and memorial continuity. Planning and management responses operate at the grave/plot, cemetery-site, and urban-system levels, while issues of cultural recognition and institutional coordination cut across these scales. Mitigation interventions often redistribute pressures among functions and spatial levels rather than fully resolving them. Therefore, their feasibility and transferability depend on locally specific legal, institutional, environmental, and cultural conditions. This review provides a planning-oriented framework for understanding cemetery adaptation as the negotiation of interconnected land-use tensions rather than the optimization of a single function.