Top Research Papers on Urban Planning

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The ability of planning to address America’s urban problems of inequality, crime, housing, education, and segregation is hampered by a relative neglect of Whiteness and its role in shaping urban outcomes. We offer a justification for centering Whiteness within urban planning scholarship and practice that would examine its role shaping and perpetuating regional and racial injustices in the American city. The focus of planners, scholars, and public discourse on the “dysfunctions” of communities of color, notably poverty, high levels of segregation, and i...

Urban resilience as a transformative approach has become a central paradigm to define urban policy for making cities resilient. This implementation has multifaceted implications, ranging from the employment of the correct resilience approach for urban systems to the definition of the appropriate assessment framework to address all urban resilience features. This paper addresses the implications concerning the new requirements and open research questions of urban resilience assessment for resilient development for cities. According to this purpose, this paper provides three literature reviews t...

Findings from a recent literature review on AI in planning are highlighted and the results of a national survey of urban planners about their perspectives on AI adoption and concerns they have expressed about its broader use in the profession are discussed.

3D spatial data and their models transform themes of the city, such as buildings, bridges, vegetation, etc., to the digital world, are being updated when required, and create advantages in digital space, and need to be highlighted and published.

It can be concluded that current tools, are not readily applicable to support decision making as such, but if applied cautiously, they can have an indicative role to pinpoint further targeted and in-depth analyses.

The climate emergency and population growth are challenging water security and sustainable urban design in cities worldwide. Sustainable urban development is crucial to minimise pressures on the natural environment and on existing urban infrastructure systems, including water, energy, and land. These pressures are particularly evident in London, which is considered highly vulnerable to water shortages and floods and where there has been a historical shortage of housing. However, the impacts of urban growth on environmental management and protection are complex and difficult to evaluate. In add...

This study presents a critical evaluation of China's New Urbanization Plan (NUP), a preliminary assessment of its implementation, and some policy recommendations. This study evaluates the NUP within the context of China's urbanization and its theoretical debates, arguing that the NUP harbors a hidden agenda of facilitating a transition in the regime of accumulation. The priority given to economic development imposes structural constraints on the attainment of human-centered urbanization. Furthermore, the NUP's goal to enhance interregional equality and national security is reminiscent of strat...

The proposed approach can provide a functional, economic, people-friendly, eco-friendly urban road planning scheme considering new road construction and existing old road widening to alleviate traffic congestion and provide an alternative route for drivers that conforms to their habits.

• Urban form was depicted in size, shape, and centrality. • Centrality dominated influencing nighttime SUHI. • The relationships which were size-dependent, varied across climate zones. • The optimal urban form for SUHI mitigation is moderately sized, dispersed, polycentric, and decentralized. There is a growing demand for urban form optimization to mitigate urban heat island (UHI) effect. Nevertheless, how UHI responds to various urban morphological patterns is still limitedly understood, especially for cities in developing countries. Here, based on 1288 urban clusters identified automatically...

A graph-based artificial intelligence model for urban planning outperforms human-designed plans in objective metrics and can generate spatial plans responding to different circumstances and needs, offering an efficient and adaptable collaborative workflow for future sustainable cities.

Cities across the Unites States have embraced green infrastructure (GI) in official planning efforts. The plans conceptualize GI as providing multiple functions and benefits for urban residents, and form part of complex responses to intersectional urban challenges of social injustice and inequity, climate change, aging and expensive infrastructure, and socio-economic change. To date, it is unclear whether official city GI programs address systemic racism and urban inequality. To fill this knowledge gap, we coded and analyzed 122 formal plans from 20 US cities to examine if and how they address...

As cities are struggling to cope with the second wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of 15-min cities seem to have sparked planners’ imagination and politicians’ willingness for providing us with a new urban planning eutopia. This paper explores the “15-min city” concept as a structural and functional element for redesigning contemporary cities. Methodologically, a study of three case cities that have adopted this new model of city vision, is carried out. The analysis focus on understanding how the idea of 15-min cities fits the legacies of different cities as described by tradition...

The literature review revealed that random forest, deep learning like convolutional neural network (CNN) and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms are best suited for classification and pattern analysis of earth observation-based data.

In the context of urban land-use growth and the consequent impacts on the environment, green spaces provide ecosystem services for human health. The ecosystem services concept synthesises human–environmental interactions through a series of combined components of biodiversity and abiotic elements, linking ecological processes and functions. The concept of green infrastructure (GI) in the urban context emphasises the quality and quantity of urban and peri-urban green spaces and natural areas. In dense urban contexts, the applications of GI are limited and not applied to the potential urban spac...

Investigation of the contribution of using urban green space components as the basic units in green infrastructure strategy planning for urban ecosystem conditions and services shows that changing the composition and spatial arrangement of urbangreen space components, synergy or trade-off of various services can be stimulated easily.

This study presents a comprehensive review of the areas of urban planning in which AI technologies are contemplated or applied, and it is analysed how AI technologies support or could potentially support smart and sustainable development.

Urban parks are a major blue–green infrastructure in urban ecosystems, and they are widely regarded as being extremely effective in mitigating the urban heat island (UHI) effect caused by extensive urbanization and high temperatures associated with climate change. A scientific understanding of the cooling effects of urban parks can assist urban planning and decision makers in mitigating the UHI effect and improving urban sustainability. However, little is known about the cooling effects of parks from an accumulation-impact perspective resulting from spatial continuity. In this study, 31 urban ...

Even though urban land-use change simulations provide useful information for decision makers, planning is generally weakly integrated into land-change modelling. However, the increasingly digitally available zoning data from statutory planning offers new opportunities. This study aims to reveal the potential effectiveness of statutory planning in terms of sustainable urban development by integrating zoning regulations in a multi-scenario simulation. Specifically, the gross floor area that can be built per parcel, as defined in the zoning plan, supports the allocation of varying degrees of urba...

A new framework is promoted – Towards Healthy uRbanism: InclusiVe Equitable Sustainable (THRIVES) – that extends previous conceptualisations and reorients focus towards the existential threat of environmental breakdown and the social injustice created through inequitable and exclusive urban governance and design processes and outcomes.

Commercial urban agriculture is typically restricted to agriculture land use, green or open spaces, or under-utilised or undeveloped land. As urbanising cities face the double threats of urban food insecurity and land scarcity, multi-functional urban land uses that integrate rather than separate agriculture from other land uses could be a critical adaptation for the sustainability of future cities. With less than 1% of land in agricultural use, the high-density, city-state of Singapore is testing integrative approaches to where and how food can be grown in the city. The shift toward land use m...

A systematic literature review using the SCOPUS database, searching for articles integrating knowledge in urban planning, remote sensing and ecology found that the level of integration between the three disciplines is limited.

Green Infrastructure (GI) planning firstly developed as an integrated approach to ecological and conservation planning. Then it has advanced and used in several disciplines such as urban and reginal planning and landscape architecture. This diversity has promoted a range of planning initiatives and widespread its usage while make it difficult to define and operationalize GI planning. However, this is a planning strategy that has the potential to promote urban landscape planning by providing a holistic understanding of the dynamics of socio-ecological systems. GI planning, by producing a variet...

Urban regeneration has been a major concern in urban studies globally. China's urbanization is transitioning from a growing space to regenerating existing communities, which calls for reevaluating the newly emerging trend of urbanization in China. This study aims to investigate China's increasing focus on urban regeneration through the practice of community redevelopment, with an emphasis on public participation in community planning and how communities re-archive vitality and public favor. Considering the Shapowei community in the city of Xiamen, Fujian province as a case, we introduced a met...

From the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, the scientific community has been continuously trying to assess the virus, its socio-environmental impacts, regulatory/adaptation policies, and plans. The emergency is to develop pandemic-resilient city planning and management in order to tackle the infectious diseases during COVID-19. Such development includes the reframing of unsustainable urban patterns, hazards, and social inequalities to be prepared for the emerging cases. In this study, we focus on the assessment of disaster risk management (DRM), which will help to develop pandemic-resilient ur...

Urban Green Infrastructure (GI) provides multiple benefits to city inhabitants and can be an important component in nature-based solutions (NBS), but the ecosystem services that underpin those benefits are inconsistently quantified in the literature. There remain substantial knowledge gaps about the level of service supported by less studied GI types, e.g. cemeteries, or less-studied ecosystem services, e.g. noise mitigation. Decision-makers and planners in cities often face conflicting or incomplete information on the effectiveness of GI, particularly on their ability to provide a suite of co...

The results show that the risk-cost-based path planning method can generate safer path for UAV operations than the traditional shortest-distance-based method.

Performance-based planning is advocated as a promising alternative to more common prescriptive approaches (e.g., traditional zoning), to manage the complexity of current urban development in a flexible and effective way. The aim of this paper is to develop and test an innovative performance-based planning approach built around the assessment of ecosystem service supply and demand. The approach moves from the overall objective of enhancing the provision of relevant ecosystem services in the city. Accordingly, proposed urban transformations are subject to a performance assessment aimed at limiti...

Urban green spaces provide cultural ecosystem services, and urban policies typically aim to enhance these services by targeting new investments in deprived areas. The implementation of urban greening policies is one way to reduce inequalities in well-being, for example by targeting areas where increased access to green spaces will benefit citizens of low socioeconomic status. Most research has addressed the targeting of green infrastructure development by considering income and access to green spaces, while few studies have considered a multidimensional definition of well-being. The aims of th...

A pragmatic, comprehensive overview of technical, methodological, and institutional gaps and solutions amongst urban energy system modeling tools and methods is provided in order to identify relatively high-impact and easy-to-implement recommendations for tool developers, researchers, urban energy planners, policymakers, and other decision-makers.

In the last decade, a number of severe urban power outages have been caused by extreme natural disasters, e.g., hurricanes, snowstorms and earthquakes, which highlights the need for rethinking current planning principles of urban energy systems and expanding the classical reliability-oriented view. In addition to being reliable to low-impact and high-probability outages, power system should also have high level of resilience to withstand high-impact and low-probability (HILP) events. Compared with power system, multi-energy systems (MESs) have advantages in improving resilience through energy ...

Dubai has experienced rapid economic growth and a remarkable urban reformation during last two decades. In Dubai's old urban fabrics, however, the infrastructure and buildings are being deteriorated, the local economy was stagnated, the urban community became weak, and the vitality of the city center was degraded. Dubai's sustainable urban regeneration project called Deira Enrichment Project plans to improve the lagging physical environment as well as comprehensive urban regeneration across the economy, society, and culture. The objective of this paper is to investigate the planning elements f...

The contribution investigates the evolution of the DT concept and contextualises this tool within the scientific-cultural debate, highlighting the interconnection between global policies and local needs/wishes.

Overall, existing knowledge shows that the COVID-19 crisis entails an excellent opportunity for planners and policy makers to take transformative actions towards creating cities that are more just, resilient, and sustainable.

Unprecedented urban growth and extensive land use change especially in the Global South has placed increasing pressure on urban ecosystem services (UES). While there are numerous studies modelling and mapping ecosystem services, integrating the outputs of multiple ecosystem service assessments to provide recommendations for nature-based planning remains a challenge. The objective of this study is to characterise the spatial distribution of multiple UES in a rapidly urbanising catchment and to develop a systematic approach to facilitate the integration of UES into planning green infrastructure ...

In AIDWRP, Markov Decision Process (MDP) discusses the dynamic water resource management issue with annual use and released locational constraints that develop sensitivity-driven methods to optimize several efficient environmental planning and management policies.

An integrated management of urban free spaces is encouraged to consider parks as key habitats for pollinators in anthropogenic dominated, urban environments to indicate the strong potential of cities to provide a habitat for different groups of pollinators.

Implications for urban planning and policy arise from the COVID-19 crisis, shedding light on ways to address inequities, support vulnerable groups, and improve quality of life in cities in times of pandemics but also under normal circumstances.

Although the exposure attributable mortality burden was lower than in other European cities and local Viennese policies favour the reduction of motorized traffic, alongside the promotion of active and public transport and urban greening, there is room for further alignment of liveability, environmental health and justice objectives.

Cities are major drivers of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions--the sources of anthropocentric climate change, whilst also concentrating people, buildings, and infrastructures and therefore potential risk and impacts of the latter. As a consequence, planning for climate change in urban areas does not only provide the opportunity but should necessitate considering interactions between mitigation and adaptation actions. However, existing research found that only a minority of urban areas consider both mitigation and adaptation in their climate action plans, i.e. 147 Climate Change A...

Simulation results demonstrate that the UAVs & UGVs system can enhance the efficiency of the task and a hybrid algorithm integrating the estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) and the genetic algorithm (GA) can greatly improve the performance of EDA and GA in terms of the quality and the stability of solutions.