Towards Sustainable Urban Development: New Approaches and Tools for Regeneration Strategies

A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Urban Contexts and Urban-Rural Interactions".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2024 | Viewed by 856

Special Issue Editors

Department of Civil, Construction-Architectural and Environmental Engineering (DICEAA) University of L’Aquila, Via G. Gronchi, 18, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy
Interests: urban planning; ecosystem services; spatial planning; geographic information systems; territorial and urban planning; land use/land cover change; spatial analysis; ecosystem multifunctionality; transformations sustainability assessment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Department of Civil, Construction-Architectural and Environmental Engineering (DICEAA) University of L’Aquila, Via G. Gronchi, 18, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy
Interests: urban planning; territorial/landscape/habitat fragmentation; geographic information systems; urban sprawl; urban sprinkling; land take; land use/land cover change; urban expansion forecast; urban modeling; spatial analysis; transformations sustainability assessment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Department of Civil, Construction-Architectural and Environmental Engineering (DICEAA) University of L’Aquila, Via G. Gronchi, 18, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy
Interests: environmental analysis and management; urban planning; land use change; geographic information system; indicator engineering
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In the past, urban planning was tasked with managing the expansive dynamics of continuously developing cities. Today, it is instead asked to work on the existing, with a focus on not encouraging further land consumption while preserving a high quality of urban areas, also considering emerging demands linked to climate change effects.

Extensive urban growth and its impact on environmental degradation are extremely important issues in the current scientific debate. Therefore, it is fundamental to think about urban densification and sustainable regeneration techniques as key interventions in order to overcome the phenomena of inequality and degradation of parts of cities.

Urban regeneration is a complex and integrated process involving several dimensions of citizens' wellbeing: environmental, social, and economic. It is based on interdisciplinarity and aimed at enhancing the overall quality of urban space. Although the topic has been widely explored both in practice and in academic research over the last decades, the challenges we face require new approaches and methodologies to guide urban regeneration programs, also providing the tools to monitor any potential adverse effects related to e.g. green and climate gentrification.

Recent advances in methodologies based on innovative approaches to the new scenarios of urban transformations make it possible to structure new protocols and technical tools suitable for reading the territory in support of planning with the aim of orienting territorial governance actions toward the achievement of the Agenda 2030 Sustainability Development Goals.

Climate change and related impacts at the urban scale, social issues including gender inequalities, the availability of green areas related to public health and post-pandemic cities, and the energy crisis are some of the key issues in current and future regeneration programs. To this end, it is necessary to develop new approaches and methodologies to assess and map these specific demands, identify stakeholder groups and define a scale of priorities for regeneration interventions to be planned.

The special issue aims to focus on the role of urban and regional planning in the management and control of urban growth with the ultimate goal to meet specific needs while increasing the resilience of urban settlements to ongoing crises.

We welcome review papers and case studies that, through the use of methods and indicators useful for the purpose described, contribute to structuring a knowledge framework suitable to support the transfer from academic research to urban planning practice.

We would also like to capture the interdisciplinary character of the chosen topic by collecting research from different fields (engineering, urban planning, biology, land sciences, social sciences, etc.) or multidisciplinary teams.

This Special Issue will not only comprise selected papers from the 12th International Conference on Innovation in Urban and Regional Planning (INPUT2023), but will also gather papers by interested experts worldwide. The event will be held during 6–8 September 2023 in L’Aquila (Italy).

References:

- Romano, B.; Zullo, F.; Fiorini, L.; Marucci, A.; Ciabò, S. Land transformation of Italy due to half a century of urbanization. Land use Policy 2017, 67, 387–400, doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.06.006.

- Romano, B.; Fiorini, L.; Zullo, F.; Marucci, A. Urban growth control DSS techniques for de-sprinkling process in Italy. Sustainability 2017, 9, 1852, doi:10.3390/su9101852.

- Saganeiti, L.; Mustafa, A.; Teller, J.; Murgante, B. Modeling urban sprinkling with cellular automata. Sustain. Cities Soc. 2020, 65, 102586, doi:10.1016/j.scs.2020.102586.

- Saganeiti, L.; Favale, A.; Pilogallo, A.; Scorza, F.; Murgante, B. Assessing urban fragmentation at regional scale using sprinkling indexes. Sustainability 2018, 10, 3274, doi:10.3390/su10093274.

- Marucci, A., Fiorini, L., Saganeiti, L., & Donolo, R. M. (2022). Indicators for monitoring the Sustainability of Transformations in Territorial Planning. In 1st International Conference on Future Challenges in Sustainable Urban Planning & Territorial Management (online) 17–19 January 2022; doi: 10.31428/10317/10580

- Scorza, F., Pilogallo, A., Saganeiti, L., Murgante, B., & Pontrandolfi, P. Comparing the territorial performances of Renewable Energy Sources’ plants with an integrated Ecosystem Services loss assessment: a case study from the Basilicata region (Italy). Sustain. Cities Soc. 2020, 56, 102082. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SCS.2020.102082

- Romano, B., Zullo, F., Saganeiti, L., & Montaldi, C. Evaluation of cut-off values in the control of land take in Italy towards the SDGs 2030. Land Use Policy 2023, 130, 106669. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.LANDUSEPOL.2023.106669

- Pilogallo, A., Saganeiti, L., Fiorini, L., Marucci, A. Ecosystem Services for Planning Impacts Assessment on Urban Settlement Development. In Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2022 Workshops; Gervasi, O., Murgante, B., Misra, S., Rocha, A.M.A.C., Garau, C. (eds); Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13380. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10542-5_17

- Pilogallo, A. and Scorza, F. Ecosystem Services Multifunctionality: An Analytical Framework to Support Sustainable Spatial Planning in Italy. Sustainability 2022, 14, 3346. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063346

- Pilogallo, A. and Francesco S. Mapping regulation ecosystem services specialization in Italy. J. Urban Plan. Dev. 2022. 148 (1), 04021072. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)UP.1943-5444.0000801

- Saganeiti, L. and Fiorini, L. Gender Dis-equality and Urban Settlement Dispersion: Which Relationship? In Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2022 Workshops, Malaga, Spain, 4–7 July 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10450-3_23

- Fiorini, L.; Falasca, F.; Marucci, A.; Saganeiti, L. Discretization of the Urban and Non-Urban Shape: Unsupervised Machine Learning Techniques for Territorial Planning. Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 10439. https://doi.org/10.3390/app122010439

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Angela Pilogallo
Dr. Lucia Saganeiti
Dr. Lorena Fiorini
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • urban planning tools
  • sustainability
  • resilient city
  • ecosystem services
  • urban densification
  • indicators engineering
  • policies
  • spatial analysis
  • green and climate gentrification

Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission, see below for planned papers.

Planned Papers

The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.

Title: Investigating Urban Complexity through Space Syntax and Agent-based Models: Are Top-down and Bottom-up approaches in conflict?
Authors: Federico Mara; Valerio Cutini
Affiliation: University of Pisa, Italy

Title: Urban energy resilience and strategic urban planning in Emilia-Romagna: evidence from three cities
Authors: Giovanni Tedeschi
Affiliation: University of Parma. Department of Engineering and Architecture. Parco Area delle Scienze, 181/A, 43124, Parma, Italy. giovanni.tedeschi@unipr.it
Abstract: Contemporary cities are facing many challenges, from social and economic issues to the new risks related to the impacts of climate change. Focusing on energy consumptions, and the related GHG emissions, cities are considered not only the main global contributors but also the areas most exposed to risks, because of their density of population and economic activities. Implementing urban planning strategies with the purpose of increasing energy efficiency and resilience overall are, for all these reasons, considered a top priority. This paper investigates the innovative contents about energy-efficient and energy-resilient urban planning solutions that have started to be implemented in the cities of the Emilia-Romagna region. Two kinds of planning instruments are therefore analyzed: the voluntary Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs) and the mandatory General Urban Plans (GUPs), recently approved in several cities of Emilia-Romagna. A comparative analysis of three cities in the Emilia-Romagna region, Bologna, Modena and Ravenna, is proposed on the strategies of their newly local city plans and SECAPs with focus on energy management and planning. The aim is to assess whether the new structure of local city plans and the influence of SECAPs could be useful in implementing such urban energy resiliency solutions.

Title: Digital Twin for urban development: citizens as co-creators of sustainable communities
Authors: Angela Martone; Monica Buonocore; Romano Fistola
Affiliation: Università degli Studi del Sannio, Benevento BN 82100, Italy
Abstract: The metaverse is hailed as the future of societal interactions, especially in our social engagements and across sectors like gaming, finance, and entertainment. In addition to these domains, active initiatives are striving to harness the metaverse's potential in a particularly advantageous arena: urban development. Within this realm, the metaverse involves meticulously replicating cities in digital form, allowing for the visualization and facilitation of infrastructure and growth. It serves as a plat-form to test novel concepts, technologies, and capabilities while identifying enhancements for every facet of urban life. This technology isn't solely the domain of corporations and government bodies responsible for these transformations; it's becoming accessible to citizens as well. Cities embracing this approach empower their residents to witness the impact of alterations and to actively participate in the urban planning process, traditionally confined to municipal and governmental levels. Whether it's a sprawling metropolis or a smaller community, the utilization of the metaverse and digital twins for visualizing, planning, and streamlining urban development presents a compelling chance to leverage cutting-edge digital tools. Examining different countries efforts at different stages of deploying the metaverse for urban planning reveals intriguing insights into how this technology is being implemented and integrated.

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