Portscapes—the transitional zones between ports and their surrounding urban and regional contexts—have attracted growing attention as contested spaces where digitalisation and decarbonisation transitions intersect with enduring socio-spatial inequalities. Conventional port (and portscape) planning paradigms, however, have largely excluded meaningful citizen participation, relying on top-down approaches that frame port territories as purely functional spaces, detached from civic engagement and lived community experience. This article presents a citizen-centric participatory planning framework centred on a purpose-built mobile application that operationalises the humans-as-sensors concept in a post-industrial coastal context. Working with the Port of Tyne in North East England, we deployed the application across 10 waterfront sites to support two interconnected phases of engagement. The first involved walking ethnographies with over 200 participants, generating geotagged photographic documentation, situated spatial commentary, and on-site collages. This was followed by scenario-mapping sessions with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) North East, bringing together participants from architecture and urban design, alongside members of local communities and representatives of community organisations to produce co-designed visual imaginaries for future portscapes. Drawing on a transdisciplinary framework synthesising just transitions theory, socio-ecological resilience, and participatory urbanism, we analyse how citizen-generated sensing data can challenge technocratic port planning rationalities and prefigure more equitable transition pathways. Results demonstrate that mobile application-enabled social sensing generates geolocated, neighbourhood-scale knowledge that conventional consultation methods may not capture, spatially situating residents’ experiences and concerns, and rendering visible localised environmental justice concerns obscured in aggregate port sustainability metrics. This research provides methodological and empirical evidence for integrating participatory sensing data and digital co-design tools into port and coastal planning, advancing inclusive, data-informed approaches to industrial transition governance.
Citizen participation is increasingly supported by digital tools, yet many existing participation formats prioritise static visualisation and offer limited insight into how pedestrians perceive and evaluate dynamic traffic situations. This is particularly relevant for vehicle speed perception, which shapes perceived safety and crossing decisions. Additionally, a “participation paradox” occurs when citizens engage only after preliminary planning has been conducted, and is hence approachable for the public, but costly to change. To understand how digital participation tools might better account for such experiential components, this study presents a scoping review conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta‐Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA‐ScR; 𝑁 = 52), mapping evidence across the thematic categories of technology, urban context, and sustainability. The review identifies a methodological gap between behavioural perception research and current participatory practices. By outlining design considerations, e.g., multisensory integration and technical offsets, the scoping review provides a state of the art for perception‐oriented participation, a foundation for valid and inclusive urban design decisions. Findings indicate that while immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) or 360° videos in head‐mounted displays (HMDs), offer distinct advantages for methodological safety, preventive testing, and expanded reach, they remain limited to experimental pilot stages with marginal integration into formal planning procedures. These results highlight the potential of immersive tools that bridge the gap between technical planning and human perception. However, a critical discrepancy for the use of immersive technologies is revealed: Vehicle speed is systematically underestimated in virtual environments, fostering riskier crossing decisions compared to reality.
Suburbanisation in Poland intensified alongside the socio‐political and economic transformation after 1989. While urban expansion had also occurred earlier, the post‐socialist transition fundamentally reshaped its mechanisms through market liberalisation, the emergence of private developers, and the growing importance of planning regulations. A key feature of this transformation is the emergence of a dual planning regime, in which statutory zoning coexists with special‐purpose legal mechanisms that allow residential structures to be developed despite the specific character of binding local plans, subject to municipal approval and negotiated public‐benefit investments. These changes have produced contradictory outcomes, including increasing pressure to urbanise agricultural land and growing resistance to suburban densification. This article examines the evolution of suburbanisation in Poland through three case studies in the city of Gdańsk: Olszynka, Klukowo (a subarea in Matarnia), and Błonia (a subarea in Rudniki), which represent contrasting suburbanisation trajectories. Using a qualitative comparative case study approach, the study conceptualises suburbanisation as a governance process shaped by the interaction among planning instruments, market dynamics, and social acceptance. By introducing the distinction between “wanted” and “unwanted” suburbanisation, the article contributes to debates on suburban development and city extensions in post‐socialist Europe, showing how suburbanisation is selectively promoted, contested, or negotiated depending on the alignment between institutional strategies, market pressures, and local expectations.
This article examines how planners conceptualize and design open spaces for children in large-scale suburban housing developments on the fringes of German metropolitan areas. Drawing on children’s subjective well-being research—specifically three interrelated domains identified by Fattore et al. (2017): agency and autonomy, safety and security, and self and identity—we use these domains as an analytical lens to explore where professional planning perspectives align with, diverge from, or structurally limit children’s well-being priorities, and how planning structures limit their translation into practice. Through interviews with 13 planners, we investigate how they conceptualize open spaces for children, how regulations shape their design decisions, and how children’s needs are incorporated into their work. Our findings show that planners do not ignore children; many describe them as active spatial agents who need freedom, manageable risk, retreat, and informal appropriation. However, these commitments are translated unevenly into planning terms: Safety/security are most readily operationalized, while agency/autonomy and self/identity prove harder to embed within standard procedures and project timelines. This tension becomes visible across four themes: open space design, participation formats, mobility infrastructure, and schools as contested semi-public spaces. The analysis reveals how child-oriented professional reasoning is narrowed, displaced, or made actionable through the structural conditions of planning practice.
This qualitative study explores how a temporary cultural event has impacted the repositioning of a neighbourhood and led to urban revitalisation. The analysis is based on the Kaya Kaya street festival, a private bottom‐up initiative in Otrobanda, part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Historic Willemstad, Curaçao. By temporarily using vacant (historic) properties and underutilised public spaces to host cultural activities, Kaya Kaya has played a key role in positioning the neighbourhood as an attractive and artistic place. Drawing on interviews and theories on temporary use, the economic impact of cultural events, and bottom‐up initiatives, the study analyses how the event has shaped experiences, perceptions, and actions that have led to long‐lasting impacts on the neighbourhood. It demonstrates that although events have a temporary nature, they can generate multiple long‐lasting social, economic, and physical values that create new opportunities for their surroundings. Short‐term event impacts are easy to quantify, but longer‐lasting urban effects before and after are often overlooked by property owners, developers, investors, and policymakers. This case study aims to contribute to wider research on urban strategies by offering insights into how events as temporary use can be strategically leveraged to revitalise historic neighbourhoods while addressing benefits, risks, and limitations.
This article explores the role public space plays in providing care for fluidly housed youth. These young adults are experiencing fluctuating conditions of homelessness, moving between couch‐surfing, staying in overcrowded or informally occupied spaces, and sometimes experiencing periods of rooflessness. Using an adapted typology of homelessness and building on fundamental human needs and the process of homemaking in public, the article identifies three overarching socio‐spatial needs of fluidly housed youth. Through a mixed‐methods approach, the article uncovers three spatial potentials that afford fluidly housed youth to activate and adapt urban space through processes of radical care, and identifies urban spaces suitable to build infrastructures of care that afford meeting needs along a gradient of privacy. This way, it links socio‐spatial needs, socio‐spatial affordances, and the processes of care that connect both. In understanding this logic, it gives examples for careful planning that creates urban space affordances that activate and adapt to shifting needs. While this article does not claim to solve the housing crisis, it offers a starting point for how we can centre everyday practices of fluidly housed youth and create infrastructures of care that can better afford to meet shifting needs in urban space.
African cities are undergoing rapid transformation, with a growing share of the population projected to reside in urban areas by 2050. This commentary examines both the promise and limitations of AI‐driven urban planning through a relational accountability lens. It argues that AI should not stand apart from the urban contexts it shapes but be embedded within governance systems that recognise the interdependence of social, technical, and ecological systems. Thus, by combining participatory governance, ethical foresight, and sustainability, AI can support urban futures that are not only efficient and innovative but also just, inclusive, resilient, and ecologically grounded.
The challenge of refugee settlement in urban areas is a pressing issue globally. While Germany hosts the third‐largest refugee population worldwide, around 33,530 refugees live in state‐owned accommodation in Berlin. In this context, various institutional bodies have emerged to address the settlement of refugees and their broader integration into urban neighbourhoods, including initiatives that focus on the development of temporary activities in public spaces. Focusing on one such initiative in Berlin—BENN (Berlin Develops New Neighbourhoods)—this article builds on collaborative knowledge production involving researchers, students, and refugees to critically reflect and examine the potential and limitations of state‐led efforts to co‐produce alternative urban futures. By critically engaging with the literature on tactical urbanism, we argue that these initiatives can be understood as a form of urbanism that has the potential to produce socio‐spatial transformations beyond the scope of the proposed activities. Through engaging with different design vocabularies, methods, and temporalities, the research seeks to demonstrate alternatives for collectively producing knowledge and spaces that contribute to more inclusive urban environments. Ultimately, the article aims to enrich ongoing debates on urban transformation and refugee integration, highlighting the dynamic interplay between institutional actors, communities, and academia.
This research advances understanding of urban resilience amid polycrisis by analysing how continuous military violence interacts with pre‐existing urban vulnerabilities. Using Kherson (Ukraine) as a critical case, the research offers a unique lens on urban responses to unprecedented short‐term and long‐term challenges. It shows how a city that experienced occupation, infrastructural collapse, and depopulation, in the face of constant instability and continuous attacks after liberation, reorganises its socio‐spatial systems and shapes its recovery trajectories. Drawing on spatial analysis of destruction, thematic mapping of socio‐demographic and logistical changes, and institutional capacity analysis, the study conceptualises recovery as a nonlinear dynamic process that unfolds through absorptive (stabilisation of key functions in partially populated areas), adaptive reorganisation of logistics and service networks, and transformative shifts in the most damaged areas, where conventional models of governance are no longer viable. By situating Kherson in a broader comparative debate, the study offers conclusions relevant to cities in zones of armed conflict, climate disasters, and large‐scale social upheaval. The trajectory of urban spatial development in such contexts is characterised by spatial heterogeneity, threshold conditions, and multi‐vector processes in which systemic loss, stabilisation, and adaptation occur simultaneously. The case of Kherson demonstrates that continuous military pressure limits traditional reconstruction and urban planning models. The future of cities in a multi‐crisis environment depends not only on reconstruction resources but also on rethinking recovery as a new model of socio‐spatial development, grounded in absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities, differentiated spatial strategies, and context‐sensitive governance.
Today, in many parts of the world, local urban communities are forced to self‐organise in response to the neoliberal restructuring of the state with its emphasis on privatisation, deregulation, and austerity that has hollowed out welfare provisions, leading to urban fragmentation. This article tells two stories of seemingly disconnected places, which, upon closer scrutiny, bear similarities regarding the ways in which neoliberalism and conflicts unfold in urban space: Favela da Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, and humanitarian activism across various regions in Russia. It discusses the communicative processes through which collectivities are formed and strengthened in situations of constant instability. The discussion systematises analytical insights and empirical findings from on‐site visits and interviews. Our analysis demonstrates that these groups enact solidarity as a communicative practice strengthened by place‐based relations. In these contexts, collective action that at a macro level has a political meaning gains a practical and affective significance for individuals engaged in it.
Overlapping crises and pervasive uncertainty make it profoundly difficult to think productively about the future. Navigating this landscape requires new conceptual frameworks to capture the nuances of current and future realities, including the productive potential within moments of rupture. Against this backdrop, this thematic issue explores the relationship between disruption and urban future‐making, defining disruption as both an epistemological and political tool. Rather than treating disruption as an abstract concept, it anchors its exploration in the tangible realities of the urban environment and the everyday life of cities. It brings together 12 contributions that examine theoretical and methodological interventions, the structural conditions that shape practical disruptions, and the vital role of residents, communities, and civil society organisations in shaping urban futures amidst disruption.
Disruptions increasingly constitute urban futures by interrupting established trajectories and influencing how cities are imagined, planned, and realised. This article challenges the prevailing assumption that urban disruption merely produces social fragmentation and catastrophic futures, positioning it instead as a catalyst for progressive urban transformation. Although disruption is widely discussed across politics, management, technology, and infrastructure, these discussions remain compartmentalised. Rather than adopting sector‐specific perspectives, we propose an urban‐centred framework to understand how disruptions converge and manifest within cities. The article examines how disruption functions to destabilise established thought patterns, revealing how the city operates and how urban actors might think and do the city differently. Drawing on diverse examples, this conceptual intervention highlights disruption’s capacity to create openings for innovation, creativity, and transformative change while acknowledging its potential for ambivalent outcomes. By revisiting existing scholarship on disruption, we argue for studying disruption in relation to the transformations it produces in agency, power relations, imaginaries, and future‐making. The potential of disruption to elevate marginalised voices, expand epistemic resources, and foster collective action toward better urban futures is examined. Disruption is thus reclaimed as a political and creative force—one that reorients urban research from diagnosing fragmentation toward exploring pathways for hopeful, collective, and democratic urban futures amid and through disruption.
This article examines how reception and participation practices shape urban futures in Berlin and Leipzig, highlighting Ukrainian refugees as agents of urban change. We adopt a comparative approach to summarise and re‐analyse research carried out in several projects on the two cities. Through the lens of urban citizenship, we explore how civic engagement and participation among refugees can facilitate dialogue among urban stakeholders and support the implementation of sustainable, long‐term solutions. Unlike refugees from other countries, those from Ukraine have been granted temporary protection, which affords them a broad spectrum of rights. These include immediate access to the labour, healthcare, education, and housing markets, freedom of movement within and beyond the European Union, and the ability to commute between Germany and Ukraine. Concurrently, German host communities have demonstrated an impressive ability to communicate with Ukrainian authorities and stakeholders, facilitating collaborative discussions on long‐term solutions and the co‐creation of strategies for the future. While the proactive engagement of Ukrainian refugees in Germany invites a critical reassessment of the role of civil society actors as agents of urban transformation, this discourse should also consider double standards regarding the reception of different migrant groups. From the perspectives of forced migration research and urban future‐making, this complex scenario requires new conceptual approaches to assess its impact, challenges, and opportunities.
In cities with World Heritage status, considerable attention is devoted to officially designated heritage properties and their immediate surroundings. As a result, other heritage sites, particularly those located outside the protected zone, may be perceived as less significant and become vulnerable to underfunding, weak legal protection, or lack of expert evaluation. This article examines how residents shape urban futures through the creation of new urban commons outside officially protected World Heritage zones. Using the case of Medieval Town of Toruń, Poland, a World Heritage city since 1997, this article investigates how urban futures are shaped through grassroots heritage activism. The article analyzes two situations in which citizens challenged the boundaries of institutional heritage frameworks and asserted their right to shape the city’s cultural landscape and future. Empirically, the study is based on a combination of semi‐structured expert interviews and a contextual analysis of local and regional media publications, official statements, and planning documents related to the contested heritage sites. The study shows that despite constraints related to the Covid‐19 pandemic, Toruń residents succeeded in making their expertise count, either by joining decision‐making bodies or by involving experts whose authority was recognized by institutions. This allowed for the creation of new urban commons and led to the partial preservation and official recognition of contested heritage sites.
Digital twins are used to represent and analyse urban environments, providing a basis for simulation, scenario testing, and communication among stakeholders. While effective, such models are typically developed as unique, data‐intensive representations of specific cities. Synthetic cities extend this paradigm by enabling the systematic generation of entire families of digital twins. They provide controlled, repeatable, and easily calibratable environments, making it possible to conduct analyses that are more general, reproducible, and independent of costly or sensitive field data. Generating synthetic cities addresses several key needs in urban research. It supports the design and evaluation of regulatory scenarios, facilitates climate adaptation analyses, and enriches participatory design by providing semantically meaningful models for discussion. By decoupling experimentation from real‐world data constraints, synthetic cities provide a robust framework for testing alternative urban forms and policies while preserving privacy and reducing costs. This article introduces a novel method for generating synthetic cities using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we propose an iterative LLM‐guided framework in which the model directly generates high‐level synthetic road structures and calibrates them through tool‐based structural feedback. Unlike procedural generators and neural generative models, which usually require manual parameter tuning and offer limited ways to enforce high‐level semantic constraints, our LLM‐based framework translates natural‐language requirements into quantitative specifications and validates generated networks against target metrics. This supports the creation of adaptable, semantically meaningful synthetic cities suitable for simulation and scenario analysis.
In the context of climate breakdown and socio‐economic precarity, this article introduces the novel concept of urban fallows as fertile grounds for rethinking urban heritage through the dynamic interplay of space, value, agency, and time. Building on our previous summer school on “Staying with the Fallows” within rural commons, we extend its ecological and temporal insights to the urban realm, proposing a typological framework for reimagining the dynamic cultural and material worth of underused urban fabric. Rather than conceiving disused buildings or sites as vacant voids awaiting reintegration into cycles of capital accumulation, this article reframes them as latent commons, as spatial and cultural reservoirs imbued with social memory, ecological potential, and the capacity to host alternative, speculative urban futures. Drawing from place‐based investigations of urban assets across scales, this article explores how practices beyond conventional use such as situated care, custodial stewardship, and collective reimagining can serve as relational modes of heritage production through which urban value, agency, and temporal rhythms are reconfigured beyond logics of permanence, productivity, and exchange. These practices challenge dominant value logics tied to property, permanence, extraction, and productivity, offering alternative temporalities grounded in rest, repair, and relational use. The article asks whether the often static, narrow notion of heritage can be expanded to generate new value from our existing resources. This article draws on data collected from the Radical Heritage summer school, a collaborative, research‐driven initiative. By embedding fallow thinking into practice, this project seeks to activate new value channels and cultivate new spatial sensibilities oriented towards long‐term care, time, and cultural revaluation in the urban environment.
The question of what becomes of urban future‐making when a city loses its institutional anchor has received insufficient scholarly attention. This article addresses this gap through the concept of lostness—developed here as an analytical alternative to deficit‐oriented frameworks such as shrinkage or decline. Lost cities are settlements that, following large‐scale disruption, have been displaced from the purview of state or corporate control and expert‐driven urban development, and find themselves in search of new trajectories. Rather than a condition of passivity or failure, lostness may engender distinctive, place‐based forms of agency—and, in some cases, a deliberate resistance to being “found” and absorbed into systems that do not serve local interests. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at JHQ Rheindahlen, Germany—a former joint headquarters of British Forces and the NATO Northern Army Group, operational from 1954 to 2013 and now poised between abandonment and a deferred state and federal development agenda—the article examines how residents continue to enact futures despite their marginalisation from formal planning. Engaging theories of minor futures, projective grammars, and temporal disenfranchisement, we demonstrate that institutional withdrawal does not suspend future‐making but fundamentally reconfigures its character. Expert visions tend toward conclusive futures with defined endpoints and abstract assessments of value, while residents articulate minor futures through transgressive spatial appropriations, informal memory practices, and a persistent prioritisation of use‐value and accessibility. These two orders of future‐making rarely enter into direct dialogue, producing an asymmetry of recognition we term “limited inclusion”—with significant implications for inclusive urban planning and governance.
Contemporary urban life is increasingly shaped by unstable temporal arrangements arising from redevelopment, digital mediation, shifting labour regimes, and ecological pressures. This article proposes intermittence as an analytical lens to understand how these temporal dynamics organise the everyday urban experience. Rather than treating intermittence as a marker of precariousness or ephemerality, the article frames it as a rhythmic form of continuity, sustained by patterned cycles of appearance and withdrawal that operate alongside more stable urban structures. Drawing upon phenomenological, anthropological, and chronopolitical debates, this article develops a conceptual framework that distinguishes between temporality, temporariness, and intermittence, and introduces a typology of temporal regimes: structural-cyclical, programmed-intermittent, occasional-temporary, and contingent. The methodology combines ethnographic observation, temporal mapping, interviews, and photographic documentation, based on fieldwork conducted within the Intermittent City research project. Four Lisbon-based cases exemplify how distinct temporal configurations shape urban practices and access to shared infrastructures: Fruta Feia (programmed-intermittent cooperative cycles), Renaturalizar Lisboa (structural-cyclical ecological care), Cinema no Estendal (occasional-temporary cultural activation), and Gira (contingent, platform-mediated mobility). The analysis shows that intermittent practices can sustain social, ecological, and cultural infrastructures without relying on permanent spatial occupation, while also exposing temporal inequalities tied to digital systems, ecological rhythms, and public space governance. The article argues that recognising time as a shared, structured, and unevenly distributed urban resource is crucial to understanding how people and the of in cities.
The relationship between forced migration and urban resilience is an under‐researched topic within both the local resilience and migration discourses. While discussions tend to focus on institutional and psychological resilience, we argue that forced migration should be considered a systemic component of urban resilience and the future of cities. As resilience is currently understood in many different ways, even in contrasting ways, we contend that true resilience requires counteracting the pervasive “threat” of arrival and its criminalisation. There is a need to establish counter‐narratives that replace narratives of fear, hate, and division with narratives that uphold everyone’s human dignity. These narratives should emphasise what urban societies have in common and demonstrate how inclusion can shape urban futures. While there is no reason to romanticise the “productive moments” of disruptions induced by forced migration, these moments are crucial for learning how to navigate urban realities and futures in arrival and postmigrant societies. They are also indispensable for building societal resilience in times of crisis. Likewise, we need to be more aware of the risk of depoliticising the discourse on local resilience by viewing a “broad consensus” as a resilient solution—this tends to silence critical voices.
The Covid pandemic has affected society in many ways. In the built environment, it has impacted how buildings are used and by whom. These changes have affected market behaviours as owners look to reposition assets and meet altered demand paradigms. Changes to work praxis following Covid, particularly working from home (WFH), have affected commercial office values in central business district (CBD) markets. This has resulted from companies needing less space and taking advantage of discounts on higher-quality office space. With incentives increasing and rental growth stagnating due to decreased demand, particularly in lower-grade assets, capital values have declined, and the investment market has slowed. In response to these shifts, efforts to rejuvenate the commercial property sector in Australia include the development of the Sustainable Temporary Adaptive Reuse (STAR) toolkit. The STAR toolkit developed a series of resources that enable owners to assess the short-term reuse potential of an asset. The aim of the toolkit is to reduce vacancy and drive uplifts in rental income, through temporary adaptive reuse. This article demonstrates the capacity of the STAR toolkit to help reposition an asset by sustainably reusing some, or all, of the vacant space. The approach provides a strategy for owners to improve usage and rejuvenate assets, creating value uplifts and income stream security in challenging market conditions.
