Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in urban planning to generate land-use scenarios, mobility models, digital twins, participatory visualisations, and design alternatives. This PRISMA-guided review synthesises 63 peer-reviewed publications and selected scholarly preprints from 2015 to 2025. It maps six model families, five application domains, and five human roles: initiate, constrain, co-create, evaluate, and deploy. Findings show strong emphasis on problem framing and constraint-setting, but limited evidence of iterative co-creation, human-centred evaluation, governance, or deployment. To interpret this imbalance, the article develops role-complete AI urbanism for maintaining human judgement and institutional accountability across the full workflow.
In line with the perennial aim to combat urban sprawl, the compact city is lauded by planners as a means to achieve sustainability, even though clear drawbacks exist. To investigate this tension, we drew up a framework to assess the sustainability of urban form. Applying this to the North American and European literature, we found inherent trade-offs between, but also within, sustainability dimensions, which signal limits to technical optimization. This finding has implications for planning practice as well as the ongoing debate on urban sprawl and sustainable urban development. Our model can also be applied to help assess the sustainability of urban development alternatives.
Biophilic urbanism is increasingly positioned as an important approach for linking urban nature, public health, climate resilience and spatial equity. However, its development within planning- and design-oriented scholarship remains uneven, with limited clarity on how biophilic principles are operationalised, evaluated and translated into practice. This study screened 479 peer-reviewed records and analysed a final corpus of 201 English-language studies indexed in Web of Science and Scopus through bibliometric mapping and structured full-text content analysis. The review examines publication trends, collaboration patterns, geographic distribution, design typologies, spatial scales, climatic contexts, target populations, methodological approaches and evaluation metrics. Findings show that the reviewed literature is dominated by Global North research production, meso- and macro-scale interventions, visible greening strategies, qualitative approaches and survey-based evidence. Climate responsiveness, target-population specificity, participatory methods, economic valuation and performance-based evaluation remain comparatively underdeveloped within the reviewed literature. The study contributes a replicable review framework and identifies five research priorities: diversifying geographic representation, embedding climate-responsive evaluation, expanding methodological toolkits, foregrounding equity and participation, and strengthening institutional and policy integration. By clarifying both the potential and the current limitations of biophilic urbanism research, the paper positions the field as a promising but still maturing pathway for advancing climate-resilient, health-promoting and socially just urban environments.
Homelessness is now an enduring feature of cities across the globe, yet planning scholarship has been reluctant to say plainly what it owes the unhoused. In this essay, I argue that planning scholarship's engagement with homelessness reflects two connected failures. First, its analytical frameworks remain too parochial to address the global structure of informaility that creates housing precarity. Second, its normative foundations remain too thin to evaluate responses against what unhoused people need to flourish. Drawing on worlding and frameworks from the Global South, I develop a scholarly planning approach that engages urban informality and precarity as analytical categories, centers racial dispossession, and grounds its prescriptions in a capabilities framework. I propose a framework for planning scholarship that reconceptualizes homelessness through the capabilities approach, justice, and human flourishing.
This article synthesizes interdisciplinary research to examine how urban environments shape the gendered risk of intimate partner violence (IPV), focusing on women's vulnerability. Drawing primarily from U.S. studies, we propose a novel conceptual model linking housing environments, economic environments, and resilience environments to IPV risk. These three pillars interact with societal factors, compounding women's exposure and complicating recovery. By clarifying these mechanisms, our model challenges assumptions that urban geography and IPV are unrelated, highlighting the need for further research into environment-based prevention strategies to address gender disparities in IPV risk.
