The Role of Strategic Planning in Urban Development and Implications for Policy Making

Dear Colleagues,

The strategic spatial planning applied to the development of territories at different scales was imported from the business world, which had, in turn, already imported it from the military. Essentially, territorial strategic thinking is based on the need to develop management capable of solving and facing the problems of the present with an eye on a desired or at least expected future, which can be in the medium or long term.

Territorial strategic construction has an enormous wealth of processes, techniques, and mobilization of actors; however, today, it today enormous pressure for long-term reasons, such as the implications of the neo-liberal context, or for disruptive but episodic reasons, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, there is a disturbance in the time scale in which the medium–long-term perspective as regards the construction of visions of the city and territories is giving way to punctual, sporadic, immediate, and urgent actions. This shift is especially evident in the emergence of tactical, pop-up, post-it, or guerrilla-style urbanism, losing sight of models that seek deep, integrated, and participatory change. On the other hand, the current economic model favors opportunity, generalized commodification, and devaluation of the role of public actors, which has also weakened strategic thinking, especially with regard to the collective interest.

The goal of this Special Issue is to collect papers (original research articles and review papers) in order to develop insights whether it is possible, even in disruptive, disruptive, or dysfunctional contexts, to combine appropriate responses in regional, metropolitan, or urban contexts, with the maintenance or reformulation of broader visions over time, focused on the sustainable development of communities, economy, and territories.

This integrated, transversal, and prospective view of the territory is one of Land’s objectives, which this Special Issue aims to emphasize.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link strategic planning with themes including (but not limited to) the following:

• Resilient cities;
• Public participation;
• Strategic spatial planning;
• Land use;
• Spatial planning;
• Public space evaluation;
• Strategic urbanism;
• Stakeholders’ analysis;
• Multilevel governance;
• Regional governance;
• Urban governance;
• Urban development;
• Geographic information systems (GIS).

Dr. Jorge Gonçalves
Prof. Dr. Diogo Cunha Ferreira
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• resilient cities
• public participation
• strategic spatial planning
• land use
• spatial planning
• public space evaluation
• strategic urbanism
• stakeholders’ analysis
• multilevel governance
• regional governance
• urban governance
• urban development
• geographic information systems (GIS)