Urban planning increasingly seeks to account for how urban spaces are experienced and interpreted by city dwellers and visitors, yet experiential dimensions remain only weakly integrated into planning decision support. This article presents a proof‑of‑concept implementation of a platial decision support system (PDSS) that structures diverse forms of in situ, human‑generated evidence into a planning‑oriented analytical framework. The PDSS operationalises these observations through four analytical levels of increasing resolution. An environmental context layer, together with aggregated self-reported appraisals, establishes a structural baseline for identifying locations that warrant deeper investigation. Level 1 documents salient sensory cues through visual and acoustic observations, while Level 2 interprets these cues through individual and group-specific sense-making, transforming multimodal observations into shared empirical evidence of experiential conflicts, affordances, and planning-relevant priorities. A conceptual Level 3 situates this evidence within planning deliberation, where it can inform stakeholder negotiation and the implementation of planning measures. The framework is demonstrated using a case study in Würzburg, Germany. Results show that locations with comparable environmental characteristics and aggregated appraisal can nevertheless differ substantially in how they are perceived, interpreted, and prioritised by different user groups. Rather than prescribing planning solutions, the PDSS provides a transparent and scalable workflow that translates multimodal urban observations into shared empirical evidence, complementing established spatial analyses and supporting planning deliberation through structured, context-sensitive, and evidence-informed urban planning.
The article examines mobility app ecosystems in Milan and Amsterdam as digital infrastructures that organise practices of movement, waiting, and urban consumption, while producing specific forms of digital and material waste. Starting from a systematic mapping of mobility apps, the study focuses on applications that provide journey-planning solutions—such as Google Maps—and shows how forced choices, traffic concentration, technical malfunctions, delayed updates, service insufficiencies, and forms of passenger exclusivity contribute to making urban travel a more complex and uneven practice, while generating multiple forms of productive waste. Drawing on the walkthrough method, beginning from the app store search phase, the research compares interfaces, access logics, registration requirements, tracking systems, monetisation strategies, and communicative rhetorics. The analysis highlights how design choices produce different kinds of waste: digital waste, generated through data accumulation, advertising, and persistent notifications—often raising privacy concerns—and material waste, linked to physical infrastructures, urban congestion, and the intensive consumption of public space. Based on two years (2023–2025) of digital ethnography in the two cities, the study reveals that, despite the promise of service integration, institutional apps and private navigation platforms yield a fragmented user experience, accompanied by an increase in data extraction and a diffuse production of digital waste. In conclusion, it argues that mobility apps do not merely facilitate movement but actively reconfigure urban ecologies, participating in the production of urban space and, consequently, generating new forms of pollution, commercial opacity, and infrastructural overload.
Large regions and coastal urban communities face significant climate-related risks, including coastal and river flooding, inundations, and sea-level rise. However, long-term predictions of coastal flooding, coastal change, and associated risks involve uncertainties that are difficult to communicate to those affected. This, in turn, can hinder the adaptation of coastal communities to future changes. In our proof-of-concept case study, MAGE (Morecambe Area Gaming Environment), we developed five research tools to enhance engagement between local government and local residents on coastal change, its effects on settlements, and the existing shoreline management plan (SMP) policies. First, we created an open community mapping platform to gather voluntary geographic information (VGI). Second, we developed a mini tabletop game for KS3 Geography for secondary schools. Third, a serious tabletop game that simulates coastal systems and places in North-West UK, playing with communities and schools as a precursor to informing and developing the fourth tool: a sandbox computing system. The portable digital chessboard sandbox that visualises thousands of what-if scenarios in 2055 and 2105 uses Lancaster University’s high-end computing (HEC) resources and a VR experience (our fifth tool). This article concentrates on the decision table, using numerical coastal models, GIS, and algorithms ported to a game engine; the MAGE system features interactive play pieces that the public can move in a 3D environment. Users simulate future climate scenarios for their area and choose interventions and mitigation measures for coastal flooding or change, whether nature-based solutions or hard engineering. Research results identified a specific communication need enabled by spatial computing, allowing communities to interact within the planning decision space and provide rich experiences to mitigate climate change. The MAGE prototype and case study serve as both an educational and participatory tool for coastal communities to map adaptation pathways for transitions between SMP policies. MAGE, as a situated planning artefact, effectively bridges large-scale coastal territories—both rural and urban—to plan for coastal futures.
Following publication of the National Planning Framework, over the past decade, Irish urban design and planning policy has increasingly embraced the language and strategies of compact growth. This shift has occurred within the context of a much longer history of national spatial planning, in which the objective of “balanced” regional development has persisted despite changing ideas about the spatial form that balance should take. This article argues that the National Planning Framework represents a multi-scalar reorientation in Irish planning policy, promoting regional concentration with settlement-scale compaction, in contrast to previous strategies of decentralised sprawl. Yet little attention has been given to whether these objectives are mutually consistent, or to how they are shaping actual patterns of development. To address this gap, the article evaluates recent population and housing outcomes against stated policy targets and maps urban expansion across Ireland’s three regions. It asks what spatial forms are emerging, whether planning objectives are being met, and whether these outcomes align with Ireland’s compact growth ambitions.
This thematic issue focuses on newly planned and currently transforming districts at the outskirts of major metropolitan areas in Europe. After reurbanisation and inner development dominated urban research debates as well as planning practice from the turn of the century onwards, in the wake of continuing influx into large cities and a subsequent shortage of affordable housing, suburbanisation is coming back into focus. The contributions in this thematic issue are clustered within three key thematic areas: (a) sustainability and the planning of urban expansion, (b) planning imaginaries and the realities of suburban living, and (c) governance, conflict, and negotiation. The contributing authors have analysed case studies in Spain, Ireland, Poland, Hungary, and Germany. While each case is different and analysed through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, all show that suburbanisation is a timely and highly relevant topic that serves as a powerful lens for making current planning ideals and guidelines, contradictions and challenges, as well as societal power relations visible.
