Special Issue "Urban-Rural-Virtual: Landscapes of the 21st Century"

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, digital technologies are incorporated into social and cultural processes to such a degree that the divide between the physical and the virtual has largely diffused. This new reality profoundly affects contemporary conceptions of landscapes, both cultural and natural, with dramatic implications for urbanscapes and their constituent architectural elements.

The continuous evolution of virtual technologies throughout the 21st century has often prevented a deep reflection on their impact on our societies. In relation to our landscapes and urbanscapes, it raises a series of questions that can be the basis for future lines of research. On the one hand, the virtualization of reality has clear benefits, such as a deeper understanding of the places we inhabit, their actual and even predictive control, or the promotion of permeability between different professionals and society at large. On the other hand, many authors have observed critical dimensions such as the excessive privatization of the virtual realm, its ephemeral nature and the acceleration it imposes on cognitive and social processes, or how the virtual sometimes leads to a gradual disregard for the physical.

This Special Issue embraces all these positions and welcomes both practical and theoretical contributions that explore the relationship between our rural and urban landscapes and the virtual. Since this topic affects a wide range of professionals, the subject can be approached from ecology, urbanism, architecture, sociology, cultural studies, heritage management and tourism studies, among other disciplines.

We suggest the following thematic lines, although, of course, we invite authors to combine them or propose other topics:

• Impact of Social Media, Virtual Reality and the Metaverse in the places we inhabit
• Influence of the virtual in shaping the identity, history and perception of space
• Big data and spatial research: Implications on the meshing of qualitative and quantitative research methods
• Modeling softwares: Virtual asessments and their critiques
• New spatial imaginaries: Alternatives, experiments and explorations
• Landscape and heritage management: Physical and virtual historical layers
• New methods for urban management and professional practices
• Digital twins, deep mapping, and the virtual datafication of physical spaces: uses and impact
• User Generated Content (UGC) or online surveys and the social perception of space

Dr. Nicolas Marine
Dr. Cecilia Arnaiz Schmitz
Dr. Yael Allweil
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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