Urban Design is often promoted as a means of creating more inclusive built environments, but efforts by public authorities to raise design standards in new developments can produce outcomes that are exclusionary and unjust. Tools such as design controls and review panels have been found to discriminate against minority groups, to raise development costs, catalyse gentrification, and cause displacements and evictions. A key challenge for public authorities is thus to reconcile the pursuit of high-quality urban design with justice considerations. Addressing this challenge, this paper makes three contributions. First, it problematises the way that ‘good’ design is currently pursued through planning systems, exposing its exclusionary potential. Second, it introduces a tool for assessing public authority design interventions from a justice perspective. Third, it uses this tool as part of a critical analysis of design guides and codes in England in 2024. Through this analysis, the authors highlight numerous ways in which existing design guides and codes are failing to support urban design justice. These include promoting characteristics that can have exclusionary effects, failing to acknowledge the drawbacks of ‘good’ design, ignoring existing forms of injustice, enabling tokenistic public participation, and failing to recognise user needs and preferences. Our analysis shows, overall, that support for urban design justice in England is largely rhetorical, and that unjust outcomes are likely where new developments meet policy requirements. The paper finishes by calling for public authorities to recognise the justice implications of their design interventions, including through what we term ‘just good enough’ approaches.
This paper investigates the framing and implementation of a distinct placemaking agenda that emerged in Scotland after devolution. Developed over a period of some twenty-five years, Scotland’s placemaking agenda is often upheld for its ambitious commitment to ‘design value’ and pursuit of social and environmental policy goals. Despite this, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of the agenda and its implementation. This paper’s originality lies in its comprehensive response to this gap, which it addresses in two ways using a rigorous methodology combining primary interview and survey data, archival research, and direct observations of the built environment. First, we trace the evolution of Scotland’s post-devolution planning and urban design policies and highlight their relative divergence from those in the other nations of the UK. Second, we examine the implementation of the placemaking agenda on-the-ground in a series of housing development case studies. From this analysis, we demonstrate that a distinct and progressive commitment to placemaking has emerged in Scotland post-devolution but reveal that implementation has struggled to keep up. We argue that a series of stubborn barriers to implementation have prevented the full realisation of Scotland’s placemaking agenda. Through a fine-grained focus on the cultures of design governance practice that facilitate delivery, we contend that these deeply engrained barriers cannot be addressed by policy change alone, and require a more substantial rethink of Scotland’s placemaking practice. The conclusions are of theoretical and practical significance for understanding the context-dependent cultures of implementation within which design governance and placemaking occur.
In 2015, the United Nations (UN) introduced the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a comprehensive global framework to address interconnected challenges related to public health, social inequalities, climate change, environmental sustainability, and urban governance. In parallel, for several decades, the Healthy Cities paradigm has evolved as a holistic and context-sensitive approach to enhancing urban health and quality of life (QOL) through integrated planning, participatory governance, and cross-sectoral action. This study conducts a PRISMA-guided systematic review of the co-benefits and trade-offs associated with the dimensions and solutions of healthy cities in relation to the SDGs. In this process, 91 peer-reviewed articles published between 2016 and 2025 were retrieved from major international databases and analysed using a structured qualitative content analysis to identify dominant patterns, co-benefits, and trade-offs. The findings indicate that existing research primarily focuses on SDGs 3 and 11, while also revealing meaningful linkages with SDGs 2, 6, 9, 13, 16, and 17. Healthy city interventions, including green and blue infrastructure, active mobility systems, inclusive governance mechanisms, and evidence-informed policymaking, demonstrate substantial potential to generate co-benefits across environmental, socio-spatial, and institutional dimensions. Nevertheless, the literature highlights persistent challenges and trade-offs, such as digital exclusion, institutional fragmentation, and spatial and social inequalities in access to health-enabling environments, which continue to hinder progress toward these goals. The results show that the identified co-benefits and trade-offs are strongly place-dependent. Local culture and social norms, urban morphology and density patterns, urban microclimate conditions, mobility and accessibility structures, and institutional and financial capacities play a decisive role in shaping how healthy city strategies interact with the SDGs across different regions and cities worldwide. Accordingly, the effective integration of the Healthy Cities paradigm within the SDG framework requires translating global objectives into locally implementable planning actions and designing neighbourhood-scale, context-sensitive monitoring indicators. To achieve sustainable and equitable outcomes, urban policies should prioritise reducing socio-spatial inequalities, strengthening inclusive civic participation, and mainstreaming health considerations across all dimensions of urban development. The study underscores the need to advance place-based empirical research, context-responsive innovations, and interdisciplinary collaboration to fully realise the potential of healthy cities in shaping sustainable, resilient, and health-oriented urban futures.
This paper clarifies the nature and scope of planning theory and proposes a way to bring order to a fragmented field by developing an integrated framework for understanding both planning theory and planning theories. It begins with a critical genealogy of debates since the 1940s and identifies a persistent fault line: Planning construed either as an independent methodological discipline centered on decision-making processes, or as a substantive practice embedded within political-economic contexts- a distinction that can be translated into a tension between procedural universality and contextual particularity. This division has led to confusions in the literature. The findings show that many past disputes conflate the subject, principles, and questions or problematic areas at stake. To address this, the study adopts an Avicennian schema, introducing a new order to the field and-without siding with any pole or rejecting them-situating each aspect of planning theory in its proper place. It then advances a four-level typology of planning theories organized by nature, function, central questions, and fundamental problems. In a further step, it proposes a framework that makes explicit the foundational philosophical presuppositions underlying planning theories. The typology positions deontic, evaluative, descriptive, explanatory, critical, and justificatory theories within a single map, while the philosophical framework exposes the value-laden assumptions that shape theorizing. The paper's contribution is threefold: (i) it identifies the place of each aspect of planning theory and the various types of planning theories; (ii) it offers criteria for comparing them; and (iii) it provides a usable scaffold for research, pedagogy, and practice.
Despite mounting environmental and social pressures in African cities, urban green infrastructure remains underresearched and poorly integrated into planning frameworks, with most theoretical and empirical knowledge derived from Global North contexts. This disparity in evidence persists even as African cities face intensifying challenges related to rapid urbanization, socio-political complexity, and environmental degradation. This study, responds to this existential gap by critically investigating the evolving green spaces dynamics in Abuja, Nigeria-a rapidly expanding capital city. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with key urban development stakeholders, the research identifies six interconnected mechanisms shaping green space transformation: governance and political influence, urbanization and land use pressures, economic incentives and developer influence, institutional and operational challenges, societal and behavioral drivers, and legal and illegal conversions. These forces interact to weaken green space protection, intensify land commodification, and exacerbate spatial and environmental injustices. Quantitative analyses reveal a steep decline in green space availability-from 42.43 % in 1990-17.9 % in 2023-alongside a fall in per capita availability from 73 m2 to 22.68 m2, with significant intra-urban disparities. The loss of accessible green areas has constrained recreational opportunities, particularly for high density communities, undermining health and social equity. Comparisons with global urban regions show Abuja's challenges resonate with patterns across Africa and Asia, contrasting with the more regulated approaches seen in Europe. The study advocates for integrated governance reforms, zoning reform, participatory green planning, enforcement mechanisms, and community led-stewardship to reposition green spaces as vital assets for urban sustainability and spatial justice.
Many cities have ambitious climate targets, like becoming climate-neutral by 2050, 2040 or 2030, but are uncertain about how mobility and land use should change in order to reduce GHG emissions to levels consistent with the cities' aims. Finding answers on this, and also on the question of how to strike an effective balance between desired fundamental transformation and realistic expectations, was at the heart of the Interreg Europe project 2050 CliMobCity (2050 Climate-friendly Mobility in Cities). The project partners were four medium-sized but otherwise quite different cities (Bydgoszcz, Plymouth, Thessaloniki and Leipzig), along with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and TU Delft. Each partner city conducted a so-called demonstration study, which required defining ambitious packages of measures (mobility, land use, electrification) and forecasting changes in mobility by macroscopic transport modelling. PIK then analysed GHG emissions using its carbon model. This paper extends the demonstration studies into a case-study approach. This is preceded by an exercise in consistently structuring types of GHG and mobility performances and corresponding measures. The case-study approach is supplemented by a review of the literature on shared and micromobility. A conclusion drawn from the case study is that none of the partner cities is in fact sufficiently reducing GHG emissions. Even if electricity production was completely green, the remaining gap between GHG reduction aims and analysed GHG delivery lies between 30-81 %, dependent on the scenario and city. Shared and micromobility seem not to lead to strongly deviating conclusions. We discuss policies to close the gap. One major option discussed is tackling GHG emissions from urban freight, in forms such as organising public-private cooperation designed to accelerate the electrification of freight vehicles.
Cities have the unique potential to either exacerbate or help resolve social and environmental challenges. However, a significant gap exists between theoretical knowledge of what makes a good city and the actual production of urban spaces. This research narrows that gap by offering a pathway to the 'Wishful City' - defined as one that contributes to the happiness of the majority of its inhabitants while supporting a thriving planet. To achieve this, the study combines strategic planning with scientific methods, following two parallel lines of investigation. The first delves into a broad literature review, to identify the human Core Values a city should deliver. The second synthesizes urban quality criteria suggested by experts over time to define the Urban Requisites for an exemplary city. The research then shows how each Urban Requisite contributes to the fulfilment of each Core Value and, therefore, of the Wishful City itself. Rather than proposing an urban utopia, this study considers the city as a continuous, collective creation, where individual contributions should support common needs and aspirations. To this end, it offers a well-founded framework for developing responsive urban norms tailored to local contexts. It provides a solid step towards more assertive urban policies, fostering cities with better outcomes.
Understood as "a means by which society decides collectively what urban [and rural] change should be like and tries to achieve that vision by a mix of means.", there is broad consensus that planning should fully incorporate the notion of sustainable development. Planners have a critical role in envisioning and driving local transitions to sustainable development. This requires transforming what planners learn and how they learn in higher education. This study is the first to identify a set of planning competencies for sustainable development. It proposes in three areas planning competencies for sustainable development, including (a) knowledge to understand human settlements, (b) skills to plan sustainable settlements, and (c) values to stand for sustainable communities. Following a conceptual analysis of transformative pedagogy as a superior theoretical approach to teaching for sustainable development, this study is also the first to identify types of transformative learning activities, including (1) unlearning- relearning activities, (2) learning through new experiences, and (3) ill-structured problem solving. The study therefore makes original contributions to both planning and education literature, in addition to its interdisciplinary methodological contribution through an original design of 'framing and
This paper examines urban revitalisation in Dandenong, a key activity centre in Melbourne and one of Australia's most culturally diverse localities. Conducted in two phases, the research focused on state-led revitalisation between 2006-2021. The first phase of the research (2015-2019) formed part of an international study on collaborative urban governance post-Global Financial Crisis, using predominantly qualitative methods (Davies et al., 2022). The second phase employed statistical and geospatial analyses (2011-2021) to examine the extent of superdiversity and potential gentrification risks in Dandenong, as two lesser-understood phenomena emerging from the first phase of the study. This paper first seeks to identify the social and spatial conditions that supported superdiversity to consolidate as a key feature of Dandenong over time. Framed by Fincher and Iveson's (2008) social logics-redistribution, recognition, and encounter-the paper then critically explains how inclusive revitalisation emerged in this superdiverse activity centre. We found that a well-resourced revitalisation program led by the Victorian Government and decisive, revitalisation works led by the local council, the City of Greater Dandenong built upon existing community-based mutual support networks and place-making activities to instigate a process of revitalisation. We then offer reflections on the qualities of public policy and collaboration, including values like openness to difference and acknowledgment of interconnectedness, which supported distinct opportunities for learning and solidarity in problem-solving the complex issue of urban decline in Dandenong. However, the paper also reveals limitations, where recognition of difference fell short, exposing some exclusionary elements within the revitalisation process. The findings underscore the importance of planning with social justice principles, local capacity, and recognising the value of cultural diversity and pluralism for urban renewal efforts.
Cities are facing urban heat problems which have significant environmental, economic, and social impacts. Environmental deterioration is another challenge threatening cities. To avoid hazardous environmental exposure, citizens increase the reliance on indoor space while this causes an emerging challenge to human health and wellbeing. Addressing more than one challenge in an urban context is essential. Preparing for an increasingly hot era is urgent for both developing and developed nations to mitigate negative consequences, and there is a need of biophilic design to integrate humans and nature. However, few studies have explored the integration of heat-resilient design and biophilic design. This study aims to address this gap by developing a framework for heat-resilient biophilic street (HERBST) design, where the street is highlighted for its key role in public activity. This study delineates biophilic theory and outlines biophilic street design elements, activities, attitudes and knowledge, and institutions and governance based on literature review. Afterwards, this study analyses heat-resilient street design in terms of design goals, implementation pathways, and issues addressed to clarify the potential of integrating biophilic street design and heat-resilient street design. Furthermore, this study reveals the relevance and complementarity between the two and defines the HERBST framework. In particular, the HERBST framework aims to reduce heat stress for pedestrians, increase the time people spend outdoors, increase social interaction, and alleviate heat-related physical and mental health problems while strengthening the connection between people and nature. The technical pathway of the HERBST framework is categorized into heat mitigation, adaptation, and management. Heat mitigation includes measures for transport planning, road facilities, building facades, and pocket parks; heat adaptation is linked to lifestyles, multi-sensory experiences, mental health, and social connectivity; and heat management is linked to governance systems, economic structures, and advocacy and education. The HERBST framework implementation is elucidated through site analysis, goal setting, planning and design, implementation, maintenance and management, and post-occupancy evaluation. Finally, this study discusses the research, design, cognitive, social, cultural, institutional, regulatory, and economic barriers associated with HERBST and provides recommendations. Overall, this study presents an innovative, coordinated, and implementable solution to urban extreme heat and environmental deterioration.
Since the mid-20th century, European landscapes, especially coastal regions, have faced significant transformations influenced by global and national trends, mainly driven by coastalisation. While studies have explored various aspects of coastal landscape changes across Europe and beyond, a fundamental gap remains: understanding how the conceptualisation and integration of landscape within coastal planning instruments impact broader landscape change evolution. This study addresses that gap through an evolutionary explanatory multiple case studies analysis of three municipalities in the Northern Region of Portugal, examining how the conceptualisation and integration of the landscape within three regional coastal planning instruments influenced coastal landscape changes from 1965 to 2018. Findings indicate that the degree of landscape integration varies among the coastal planning instruments, directly impacting the level of landscape protection. Our research suggests that higher levels of landscape integration could significantly enhance coastal landscape protection. An unexpected finding emerged regarding the conceptualisation of the landscape. While one might expect that a holistic conceptualisation would lead to high levels of integration, this was not always the case. Results also highlight how underlying narratives, strongly influenced by the European Union, shaped the interpretation and practical management of coastal landscapes. Our research concludes with a call for further empirical research across diverse geographies to deepen understanding of coastal landscape governance. It also emphasises the need for political will to embrace risks and foster a radical, transformative shift to approach and conceptualise the governance system in line with the changing dynamics and socio-ecological values of coastal landscapes towards coastal landscape governance.
Urban and regional planning in Nigeria is undergoing a significant transformation, with increasing specialization shaping research priorities and professional practice. This study examines emerging areas of specialization in Nigerian planning research, analyzing self-reported expertise from 208 scholars across 40 institutions. Using qualitative thematic analysis, the study categorizes 87 distinct specializations into eight broad domains: Housing and Urban Development, Environmental Management and Sustainability, Transport and Infrastructure, Land Use and Regional Development, Social and Community Development, Economic and Resource Management, Health and Safety, and Innovative and Emerging Areas. Findings reveal a dominant focus on Housing and Environmental Management, reflecting urgent urbanization and sustainability concerns, while areas such as Health, Economic Planning, and Technological Innovation remain underexplored. The study also identifies institutional and regional disparities, with universities leading theoretical advancements and polytechnics emphasizing applied research. The South-West region emerges as a research hub, particularly in Housing, Environmental Sustainability, and Transport Planning. The findings contribute to international debates on generalist vs. specialist planning, highlighting both the benefits and challenges of increasing specialization. The study underscores the need for interdisciplinary collaboration and policy integration to ensure a balanced and inclusive approach to urban and regional planning in Nigeria. Future research should explore emerging fields such as climate resilience, smart urban management, and economic sustainability to address contemporary and future urban challenges.
Growth pole policies, despite claims otherwise, remain highly relevant and widely applied across the globe. Over recent years, they have emerged as a key instrument in development strategies, often under different names. However, the concept of growth pole policies has remained somewhat elusive, and few studies have systematically evaluated their effectiveness. This has resulted in a lack of comprehensive analysis, particularly regarding their viability and impact in developing countries. The main aim of this paper is to examine the key advantages and challenges involved in the design and implementation of growth pole policies. It outlines the theoretical foundations of these policies and reviews their recent application in various developing regions. Ten case studies were analysed to identify six key lessons, differentiating between successful initiatives —those that met their objectives— and less successful ones.
Grounded in the Brazilian context, this paper offers three key contributions to a broader audience interested in planning, urban studies, and informal settlements or favela upgrading in the Global South. First, it engages with and expands upon theoretical debates concerning the role of the state, the market, and the social appropriation of space in 20th-century favelas, aiming to establish a conceptually grounded and empirically informed dialogue with the complexity and heterogeneity of contemporary informal settlements. Second, drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Heliopolis favela in Sao Paulo, we examine how this settlement diverges both from earlier representations of itself and from prevailing narratives about metropolitan favelas in Brazil. Rather than offering a conventional case study meant to illustrate how broader theory manifests "on the ground," our research contributes to wider discussions about the diverse characteristics-or "properties"-of contemporary urban informality. Third, while anchored in the historical and geographical specificities of Brazilian favelas, the paper invites broader reflections on the limits and possibilities of rights-based and reform-oriented urban planning in the Global South.
Researchers have consistently shown that determinants of health—factors beyond healthcare, including the built environment and socioeconomic conditions— significantly impact health outcomes. This understanding has led to a growing trend in recent decades towards policy discourse that links determinants of health with health outcomes. However, the scientific community's access to these policies in a structured and systematised manner remains limited. The importance of this gap cannot be overstated, as information about which determinants of health are discussed and prioritised in policy agendas is spread across various documents from different organisations, making it difficult to address relevant policy questions promptly. A scoping review of urban health policies was conducted following JBI guidelines to bridge this gap. The aim was to create a structured framework that outlines the environmental, behavioural, and socioeconomic determinants of health included in policy agendas, as well as how they are understood and prioritised, their relationships with each other and with health outcomes, and how they vary across different geographic and governance levels. Using content analysis methods, 128 policy documents from intergovernmental, national, regional, and local governance levels were analysed, covering the World and European region and the cities of London, Lisbon, and Copenhagen from 2010 to 2022. The review identified 83 determinants of health employed in policy discourse, categorising them into nine priority themes: healthy diet; drug, alcohol, and tobacco; social cohesion; physical activity; safety; active travel; natural and open spaces; environmental exposures; and basic services. These determinants of health were organised in a structured framework to illustrate their perceived relationships with each other, the priority themes, and health outcomes, as well as their prioritisation in policy discourse based on their frequency of use in urban health policy. This review represents the first comprehensive scope of how determinants of health are employed in policy discourse. The resulting conceptual framework offers a remarkably comprehensive mapping of the systemic relations between determinants of health and health outcomes, which forms a valuable tool for guiding research and practice on the policy-suggested complex multivariate causal pathways between variables. This framework provides a foundation for systematically exploring previously challenging questions, such as how research evidence is being translated into policy discourse and which aspects of this discourse are being implemented into action. Moreover, the scoping review and content analysis protocol can be replicated in other geographic regions, providing insights into potential outcome variations.
Within the rich literature on politically divided cities, infrastructure has rarely featured as a medium of urban contestation. Only transportation infrastructure has merited attention of late. This paper presents an in-depth investigation of energy infrastructures as instruments of separation, control and collaboration in three iconic divided cities: Berlin, Jerusalem and Nicosia. The purpose of the paper is threefold: 1) to identify the multiple ways in which geopolitical division and unification have manifested themselves in the cities’ electricity (and gas) supply systems; 2) to analyse the strategic responses of service providers, politicians and users to their divided and united energy systems over time and 3) to use the cases to generate insight into energy infrastructures as conduits of separation, control and collaboration in politically contested cities. The research approach is distinctive for being socio-material (exploring the politics and agency of infrastructures), relational (appreciating the co-shaping of cities and infrastructures) and historical (covering 75 years of shifting responses to division and unification). The findings from this long-term analysis challenge simplistic distinctions between separation, control and collaboration. They point, rather, to the co-existence and even hybridisation of these three strategies at any one time and place, as well as to the limitations facing ideal types, as expressed in our terminology ‘seductive separation’, ‘constrained control’ and ‘conditional collaboration’. The paper emphasises the need to see beyond and within a city to comprehend the contested geographies around energy in divided cities. It also highlights the politicised indeterminacy of infrastructures in volatile urban environments, countering popular images of them as bulwarks of stability.
Urban agriculture (UA) has emerged as a crucial strategy for ensuring sustainable food access in both developing and developed nations. However, the interplay between planning regulations and land availability significantly influences farmed land's scope and location, directly impacting UA activities' scale and intensity. The spatial mechanisms governing land use for UA stem from planning regulations, which may or may not align with food policies shaped by municipal actors—whose objectives often differ from those of civil actors. This review analyzes current urban agriculture practices in cities to explore how UA is practiced, institutionalized, implemented, and sustained, considering the influence of governance mechanisms and focusing on land-based forms of UA. By reviewing 51 peer-reviewed articles, consistent challenges impeding UA across various contexts were identified. Key factors include discord between civil and municipal actors, contextual elements affecting the enactment of supportive UA policies, and urban densification encroaching upon UA land. While these issues vary between developed and developing cities, they are primary drivers of informal or constrained UA practices and tenure insecurity. The review concludes that policies aimed at regulating UA to enhance food security should prioritize scaling up farming practices by ensuring access to larger plots with more secure tenure durations. Additionally, it emphasizes the need for flexible land-use and zoning ordinances that accommodate dual land uses, the establishment of UA protection zones to counter urban densification, and the active participation of civil actors in the process.
Nearly 40 years after the first wave of Ethiopian immigration to Israel, the country's Ethiopian population still suffers from significant socioeconomic disadvantage: Many of its members live in highly homogeneous poor neighborhoods, which expose them to a variety of negative externalities. This study is the first to examine empirically the impact of Israel's policy of absorption and spatial distribution on the formation of homogeneous ghettos of Ethiopians, and the contribution of the government's major housing assistance programs for Ethiopians to solving or exacerbating this problem. The study, structured into four main stages, embraces a mixedmethods research approach drawing on diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks. In the first stage, we use descriptive statistics to introduce the current characteristics of the Ethiopian population in Israel and compare them with those of other marginalized social groups. In the second stage, we analyze the government's various housingassistance programs for the Ethiopian population, focusing on three flagship programs. The third stage analyzes the spatial outcomes of the primary housing-assistance program, which remains active to date. Lastly, through in-depth interviews with policymakers and Ethiopian leaders, we delve into the underlying considerations that lay behind the policy decisions made. The research findings indicate that Ethiopians experience social and economic disadvantages, yet their spatial situation seems to be better than that of other disadvantaged groups, because a significant part of this population apparently enjoys the advantages of living in the center of the country. The findings further show that while the various government housing-assistance programs have elevated homeownership rates among Ethiopians, they have not prevent the formation and proliferation of spatial concentrations of poverty. Nor have they ever provided both the means and the knowledge needed to enable Ethiopians households to enhance their quality of life by moving out of these neighborhoods. To truly address the problem of homogeneous concentrations of poverty, a holistic but tailor-made housing policy is essential. This policy should not simply mirroring the national housing policy, which focuses almost exclusively on homeownership, but rather incorporate diverse policy measures for different populations. A good and just housing policy must take into account the existing spatial dynamic and the core-periphery relations and ensure an environment that provides quality employment and education opportunities alongside social networks that the residents can leverage to increase their social, economic, and cultural capital. Otherwise, the government housing-assistance programs will continue to be mere lip service and too little, too late.
Metropolitan spaces are perceived as spatiotemporally dynamic entities where traditional settlement patterns transform into heterogeneous post-suburban forms, integrating complex networks of social and economic relationships. Inadequate coordination in local spatial planning is commonly seen as a crucial factor contributing to landscape fragmentation and persistent urban sprawl. The current ‘post-political’ era of metropolitan planning supposedly offers less formalized problem-solving approaches that are not burdened by institutionally fixed settings and excessive bureaucratic structures. However, it is not clear whether and how integrated metropolitan strategies emerging within the ‘soft spaces’ of governance can influence the local spatial strategies of individual municipalities and what spectrum of attitudes various stakeholders in the metropolitan area hold towards spatial and population growth. The main research question is: What differences in approaches to territorial and population development of settlements in the metropolitan area are observed from the perspective of various public administration actors? Using a case study of the Brno Metropolitan Area (Czech Republic) and employing quantitative spatial analysis of recent and planned population and spatial development, along with qualitative textual analysis of planning documentation rationale at various scales impacting the metropolitan area, this article elucidates the narratives typically underpinning pro-growth planning strategies. Additionally, it contextualizes the meanings attributed to the metropolitan dimension of development at the local level. The findings suggest a negligible impact of integrated metropolitan strategy on local land-use policies. Competitive mechanisms of municipal spatial planning contradicting metropolitan authority visions exacerbate the crisis of spatial identities and residential cannibalism. Population growth in the hinterland triggers narratives of inevitability, adaptation, smart growth, economic rationality, and population rejuvenation at the local planning level, culminating in land oversupply. The results provide urban policies with an explanatory framework for the diversity of attitudes towards spatial and land-use planning within the multi-scale metropolitan arena and argue for the introduction of more effective integrated metropolitan spatial planning tools.
Urban design is the process of designing and shaping the physical forms of cities, towns, and suburbs. It involves the arrangement and design of street systems, groups of buildings, public spaces, and landscapes, to make the urban environment performative and sustainable. The typical design process, reliant on manual work and expert experience has unavoidable low efficiency in generating high-performing design solutions due to the involvement of complex social, institutional, and economic contexts and the trade-off between conflicting preferences of different stakeholder groups. Taking advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational capacity, generative urban design (GUD) has been developed as a trending technical direction to narrow the gaps and produce design solutions with high efficiency at early design stages. It uses computer-aided generative methods, such as evolutionary optimization and deep generative models, to efficiently explore complex solution spaces and automatically generate design options that satisfy conflicting objectives and various constraints. GUD experiments have attracted much attention from academia, practitioners, and public authorities in recent years. However, a systematic review of the current stage of GUD research is lacking. This study, therefore, reports on a systematic investigation of the existing literature according to the three key stages in the GUD process: (1) design problem formulation, (2) design option generation, and (3) decision-making. For each stage, current trends, findings, and limitations from GUD studies are examined. Future directions and potential challenges are discussed and presented. The review is highly interdisciplinary and involves articles from urban study, computer science, social science, management, and other fields. It reports what scholars have found in GUD experiments and organizes a diverse and complicated technical agenda into something accessible to all stakeholders. The results and discoveries will serve as a holistic reference for GUD developers and users in both academia and industry and form a baseline for the field of GUD development in the coming years.
