Future Cities: Concept, Planning, and Practice

Dear Colleagues,

Cities, the growth centers of commerce, culture, and innovation, are also the largest consumers of natural resources and the chief contributors of environmental pollution. They consume around 75% of the world’s natural resources, generate 70% of all waste, and emit around 70% of greenhouse-gas emissions globally (Ramsar, 2012). Today, cities face numerous unprecedented challenges due to a combination of urbanization and population pressures, increasing socio-economic inequalities, and the adverse impacts of global climate change. In the current development milieu, urban planners and designers struggle to resolve problems related to the built environment arising from increased urban complexity.

With around 70% of humanity projected to be living in urban areas by 2050 (UN 2013), cities in the future would need to provide urban services and amenities to their inhabitants on an even larger scale. The challenge would be further intensified as cities become significantly vulnerable to both natural disasters and man-made crises such as social polarization, political instability and increasing occurrence of terrorism. Future cities will demand greater attention to not only combating effects of natural phenomena, such as climate change, and also the changing socio-economic and safety landscape of the urban reality. At the same time, rapid technological advances in both material and social technology will create new possibilities and opportunities to address many of those problems. There is no doubt that the cities in the future will strive to promote various aspects of sustainability more earnestly than today and there will be more technology at hand to be applied to achieve that end. However, the challenge of attaining livable, resilient, safe and sustainable built environment would continue to be difficult.

The magnitude and severity of the challenges faced by future cities could be largely affected not only by the sustainability measures we take today but also the mindset that we develop towards employing rapid advances in technology and responding to fast moving events in politics and economics. It is imperative that we critically consider how cities are to be governed and how we approach adopting new technologies, as we lay the foundations for future cities that are inherently more resilient in responding to natural and anthropogenic hazards.

The Special Issue “Future Cities: Concept, Planning, and Practice” seeks to stimulate discussion on emerging urban concepts, planning ideas and design practices that promote various aspects of urban sustainability.

Prof. Dora Marinova
Dr. Shahed Khan
Dr. Atiq Zaman
Dr. Mohammad Shahidul Hasan Swapan
Guest Editors

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• future cities
• urban planning
• urban design
• sustainability practice
• urban metabolism
• urban resilience