The present dataset is part of the published scientific paper Hersperger, A.M., Bürgi, M., Wende, W., Bacău, S. and Grădinaru, S.R., 2020. Does landscape play a role in strategic spatial planning of European urban regions?. Landscape and Urban Planning, 194, p.103702. The goal of this research was to assess the role of landscape in contemporary strategic spatial planning. In order to assess the role of “landscape” in the strategic spatial plans, we focused on how plans took advantage of landscape’s integrative power, how plans are based on knowledge on functioning of landscape systems, and how plans show the contribution of landscapes to human well-being. For each aspect, a number of items (detailed in Table 1 of the paper) were selected to assist the assessment. This study is based on content analysis of the strategic spatial plans of 18 European urban regions. The strategic spatial plans were retrieved from the planning authorities’ websites. The cases study regions as well as the analyzed strategic spatial plans are presented in Table 2 of the paper. The authors developed a protocol containing 28 items, out of which 16 were directly derived from information presented in Table 1. As a result, we provide the following outputs: • Protocol_items.docx – freely available - Detailed description of all the protocol items used to conduct the analysis. • Coding results.xlsx – available on request - Results of the coding procedure. Data were used to create Figures 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and to qualitatively present the results in the research paper.