This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

In today’s higher education landscape, campus space design is more than a response to learning and living needs—it is also a key driver of meaningful teacher–student engagement and a stronger campus community. Yet many conventional campus plans prioritize functional layouts while giving limited attention to social interaction and psychological belonging, leading to a mismatch between built environments and real user expectations. This study proposes a set of forward-looking planning and administrative strategies grounded in a student–community interaction framework. By introducing the concept of a “molecular unit,” it connects teaching spaces, residential areas, and community services into an integrated system that encourages closer teacher–student communication. It further recommends building a coordinated campus–city linkage mechanism to promote shared resources and expand opportunities for social practice. In parallel, the creation of event-oriented spaces and a distinctive “spirit of place” is emphasized to strengthen identity and belonging among both students and staff. The study also advances a hybrid living concept aimed at reducing everyday barriers between students and instructors and enriching campus experience. Overall, these findings support spatial innovation and cultural development in higher education and provide both theoretical grounding and practical direction for future campus design.

Smart city waste management has become a central management and planning challenge as municipalities confront rapid urbanisation, rising waste loads, infrastructure constraints, and the need for data-driven public services. This article presents a structured review of the smart city waste management literature and interprets the findings through an Enablers–Barriers–Practices–Opportunities (EBPO) framework. The review is based on a Scopus-derived corpus of 332 English-language journal articles identified through a structured search, screening, and thematic-mapping process focused on Industry 4.0 technologies, smart city systems, and waste management. The analysis synthesizes the managerial conditions that support implementation, the operational and institutional barriers that constrain adoption, the currently reported digital practices, and the strategic opportunities that emerge for city governance and service redesign. Three thematic knowledge domains dominate the literature: smart waste management, transportation and decision-making, and sustainable solid waste management. The review shows that successful smart city waste systems depend not only on digital infrastructure and sensing technologies, but also on regulatory readiness, interoperability, workforce capability, data governance, and cross-sector coordination. By translating a technically fragmented literature into a management-oriented synthesis, the article offers a coherent basis for policy design, service planning, investment prioritization, and future scholarly work on digitally enabled municipal systems.

The terms 'care' and 'caring', and the strong normative emphasis in much of planning theory writing, implies that planners 'care about' how place futures evolve, who benefits from such evolutions, and how actions now affect our collective planetary future. But while there is an extensive literature on places, place qualities, planning as place-shaping and place-making; on values and ethics; and on the affective as well as intellectual dimensions of place-making activity, little use has been made of care and caring as orienting concepts in our field. Should we treat the terms as just useful descriptive words, with many synonyms? Or do they signal a new perspective which could inspire and orient place-shaping work? Or do they add and enrich ideas already developing within the field of planning theory and practice? With reference to some recent contributions to the planning literature, this essay reflects on these questions.

As ecological principles increasingly guide contemporary architectural and urban design, optimizing green-space layouts has become central to improving built-environment performance. This study applies the Pix2Pix model to interpret planning-area maps and develops a green-space layout support system implemented in a Unity3D engine with a Python-based workflow. The system enables visual simulation of alternative green-layout schemes and helps designers compare options to identify a preferred configuration. In a case validation, the AI-assisted optimization adopts a zoned daylighting strategy for public areas. Simulation results show reductions in district-building energy use, with cooling demand decreasing from 75.64 kWh/m² to 65.32 kWh/m² and heating demand dropping from 45.26 kWh/m² to 42.31 kWh/m². Residents also reported high satisfaction with the simulated retrofit outcomes. Overall, the proposed approach supports environmentally responsible and sustainable smart-city development by lowering environmental impacts and contributing to healthier, more livable urban spaces.

"A new beginning? Spatial planning and research in Europe between 1945 and 1975." European Planning Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

This piece provides a reflection on the changing political context for planning ideas and practices over the past thirty years. This period has seen the rise and now serious questioning of a neo-liberal pre-occupation with economic growth which gave little space for shaping futures through a focus on place qualities and co-ordinating the spatial dimensions of action, the core of the spatial planning project. Current concerns with promoting inclusive social well-being, reducing adverse impacts on global climate and the environment, and reviving democratic practices create new opportunities for planning understood as strategic guidance for shaping collective futures. Such a project involves not just expertise as developed in the planning field, but needs to draw on many other knowledge fields. And since many futures may evolve from present instabilities and uncertainties, it needs to adopt an active voice in promoting collective attention to spatial co-ordination and place qualities in ways which advance the values of environmental sustainability, inclusive social well-being and richly democratic modes of policy-making.

This book draws on preeminent planning theorist Patsy Healey's personal experiences as a resident of a small rural town in England, to explore what place and community mean in a particular context, and how different initiatives struggle to get a stake in the wider governance relations while maintaining their own focus and ways of working. Throughout the book, Healey assesses the public value generated by community initiatives and the impact of such activity on wider governance dynamics. Healey explores the power which small communities are able to mobilise through self-organisation and grassroots activism. Through the lens of Wooler and Glendale as a micro-society, the book centres on a community experiencing an economic and demographic transition. It focuses on three initiatives developed and led by local people – a small community development trust, an informal attentionmobilising network, and a Neighbourhood Plan project which uses an opportunity provided within the formal planning system. It examines how, in such civil society activism, people came together to promote local development in a place and community neglected by the dominant political economy. The book details the power and force of community initiative and its potential for transforming both the future possibilities for the place and community itself, as well as wider governance relations. Overall, it seeks to enrich academic and policy discussion about how the relations between formal government and civil society energy could evolve in more productive and progressive directions.

In many parts of the Western world, the liberal and democratic values and institutions on which planning ideas are based have been under sustained attack or crumbling in the face of globalising cap...