The aftermath of the 1999 war triggered accelerated urban expansion in Kosovo's cities, a development characterised by inadequate governance and unregulated urban expansion. Despite the presence of planning legislation, the coexistence of outdated municipal plans and widespread illegal construction has resulted in fragmented urban forms, raising critical questions about the effectiveness of urban planning in post-conflict contexts. This paper examines whether the Zwischenstadt framework provides an appropriate analytical lens for interpreting unplanned urban growth in post-socialist and post-conflict contexts. Using comparative case studies of Mitrovica South, Vushtrri, and Prishtina, the study combines planning legislation, planning documents, and multi-temporal geospatial analysis to evaluate five analytical dimensions: urban-ness, centrality, density, mixed-use, and ecology. The findings demonstrate that, although all three municipalities operate under the same national planning legislation, differences in planning implementation and governance have produced distinct yet comparable manifestations of hybrid urban form. Widespread illegal construction, fragmented planning practices, and reliance on case-by-case development have reinforced dispersed growth, blurred urban–rural boundaries, fragmented centrality, and uneven densities. While these spatial characteristics resemble those associated with the Zwischenstadt, they emerge through post-war reconstruction, institutional discontinuity, governance fragmentation, and weak planning implementation rather than through the processes that originally shaped the concept. The study demonstrates the analytical value of reinterpreting the Zwischenstadt framework for post-socialist and post-conflict cities and contributes to broader debates on dispersed urban development, planning implementation, and urban governance in rapidly transforming regions.
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.
