This article reviews recent academic literature on adolescent girls in public spaces with the objective of defining a framework for action in designing and planning public spaces for adolescent girls. There is growing global relevance of this age group, which now represents over 16% of the world population. Despite their demographic weight, adolescent girls are often overlooked in urban studies, which tend to focus on either children or adult women. Anchored in a gender-sensitive planning framework, this study conducts a scoping literature review following PRISMA guidelines, reviewing 2,737 documents and analysing sixty-eight publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection between 2010 and 2025. The findings are grouped by implications for planning and design. The review also identifies significant gaps in the literature, including limited evaluation of effective strategies or design elements that promote adolescent girls’ use of public space, minimal focus on leisure environments, and scarce integration of cultural and social norms that shape gendered mobility. The findings underscore the fragmented research of intersecting issues such as violence, safety, adolescent needs, and spatial justice.
Managing former military land has been a challenging task, especially due to its status as a publicly owned asset. This has arisen bottom-up using commoning approaches to satisfy people's needs. This article explores such approaches by analysing three former military barracks in central and eastern Europe: Karlo Rojc barracks, currently Rojc Community Centre (Pula, Croatia); Kas & aacute;rna Karlin (Prague, Czech Republic); and Fourth of July barracks, today called Metelkova Mesto (Ljubljana, Slovenia). This article examines the conversion of these abandoned spaces to civilian use by approaching them through the lens of Ostrom's eight design principles for successful common-pool resource institutions. By comparing the case studies through these principles, this article demonstrates how the cases are based on features that can make them proper commons, as well as potential risks related to the profit-oriented approach conducted by technocratic or growth-oriented coalitions.
Regenerative development has gained prominence as an ecological paradigm in urban planning; however, its integration into urban transformation processes remains conceptually fragmented and uneven in practice. This study examines how regenerative development is framed within discussions on urban transformation, with a particular focus on its implications for planning systems and policymaking. A systematic literature review, guided by PRISMA protocols, identified thirty-eight peer-reviewed articles indexed in Scopus, which were coded using MAXQDA and analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. The findings reveal five interrelated dimensions of regenerative urban transformation (RUT): underlying rationales, key components, implementation challenges, modes of integration into urban planning, and evaluation approaches. The literature positions RUT as a response to the unsustainability of dominant urban models that degrade ecosystems and increase climate vulnerability. Core components – such as circular economy principles, public participation, adaptive reuse, and digital technologies – are widely acknowledged but often addressed as isolated interventions rather than integrated planning mechanisms. Key challenges include limited social acceptance, financing constraints, behavioural change requirements, and weak institutional coordination. Although integration into urban planning is commonly framed through alignment with sustainable development strategies and ecosystem services, persistent gaps remain in governance alignment and policy coherence. The study concludes that current assessment tools suffer from limited scale adaptability and weak links to planning and policy decision-making, constraining the practical evaluation of RUT.
Urbanization has intensified since the First Industrial Revolution, generating acute socioeconomic and environmental pressures for local authorities, particularly in relation to air quality management. Declining air quality in urbanized areas remains a central challenge, and urban spaces with vegetation, especially urban trees, are increasingly valued for their regulatory ecosystem services. This study examines the potential of urban trees for CO2 sequestration in Bucharest, Romania. Tree distribution and species composition were spatially represented with geographic information systems (GIS) based on data from the city's Green Registry, and sequestration potential was quantified using validated assessment tools. The results reveal pronounced spatial disparities, with substantial deficiencies in tree cover across several districts. The capacity of areas covered by trees and shrubs to sequester CO2 is negligible relative to overall urban emission levels. Native species display greater sequestration efficiency, although nonnative species dominate urban landscapes, largely reflecting financial and aesthetic preferences in planting practices. These findings underscore the limited regulatory impact of current urban tree cover on carbon sequestration and emphasize the need for targeted, nature-based strategies-particularly the expansion of native vegetation-to support urban carbon sequestration management.
Urban vitality reflects the intensity and diversity of everyday urban activities and their spatial distribution, serving as a key indicator for planning and managing cities. In medium-sized, post-socialist cities, spatial disparities in vitality often remain underexplored due to limited data integration and analytical tools. This study examines urban vitality in Ni & scaron;, one of Serbia's few medium-sized regional centres, using a spatial multi-criteria assessment that integrates socioeconomic, infrastructural, and spatial indicators. An entropy-TOPSIS multi-criteria model integrated with GIS was applied to determine the relative importance of indicators and derive a composite urban vitality index across sixty-nine settlements. The analysis reveals pronounced intra-urban differences, highlighting areas of concentrated vitality as well as zones of relative functional and social weakness. Beyond mapping vitality, the study identifies key indicators that most strongly influence urban vitality and provides insights into monitoring and enhancing vitality in similar urban contexts. The findings provide a transparent, spatially explicit framework to support evidence-based planning, targeted regeneration, and follow-up qualitative or participatory assessments in medium-sized cites.
