This thesis has focused on practices in greenspace policies and planning. It was the central assumption that we can learn from practice in order to improve practice, particularly by moving it closer towards place- and people-sensitive approaches. In this respect, planning was primarily referred to as the imaginative and interpretative work involved in framing ideas and translating these into policy texts, plans, and actions on the ground. The thesis presents three studies of practices:The first study concentrates on the question of how forest expansion discourse in Flanders, having its origins in a relatively small group in a defensive position, could gain prominence in current land use debates and even come to produce a new set of spatial practices for shaping the rural-urban interface. In tracing back the development of this discourse, the emphasis was on the genealogy of discourse-actor relationships over the past decades, including the translation of discourse into various (non)-discursive forms. The case of the Ghent Park Forest was used to explore what happened to forest expansion discourse when it came to interfere with different actors in a local planning situation. The study draws attention to the powers of 'organising' ways of representation, in particular an appealing 'story line'. It was questioned what makes a story line effective (or not) in carrying forward its strategic idea along the various trajectories from concepts and ideas to actual implementation that are constitutive of a long-term policy processThe second study is concerned with the issue of factual evidence and normative prescription as it is used in planning practice. It presents an integrated indicator, made operational in a Geographical Information Systems (GIS)-based working procedure, and designed to monitor the greenspace provision in cities against quantitative and qualitative targets. It was demonstrated that not only can the GIS-based applications provide a powerful tool for analysis and representation, but they can also play ...