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.

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.