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

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

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