urban planning Recently Published Documents

Total documents.

  • Latest Documents
  • Most Cited Documents
  • Contributed Authors
  • Related Sources
  • Related Keywords

A Smart Urbanism Management Platform

We all aspire to urbanism that recognizes the social, economic, political, cultural and physical-spatial dimensions of cities. Urbanism, which, based on working tools (SDAU, Planning Regulations, etc.) based on a quality model, will allow good practice and good translation of these systems on the territory (neighborhood, city, rural environment, etc). Due to that, we are interested in our article to propose and develop an automated urban planning management platform for the generation of updates proposed by urban planning experts in order to improve the quality of amenagement regulations.

Co-creation of knowledge in the urban planning context: The case of participatory planning for transitional social housing in Hong Kong

Suptm 2022: 1st conference on future challenges in sustainable urban planning & territorial management, urban planning in a hungarian town after the red sludge disaster, urban planning facing to dispersion in the traditional huertas of region de murcia, the gender perspective in sustainable urban planning, the concept of migratory emergency in territorial and urban planning: analysis of the spanish mediterranean coast, extended function analysis of urban planning and design based on automatic extraction algorithm of closed area boundary.

With the continuous development of social economy, the expansion of cities often leads to the disorderly utilization of land resources and even waste. In view of these limitations and requirements, this paper introduces the automatic extraction algorithm of closed area boundary, combs the requirements of urban boundary extraction involved in urban planning and design, and uses the technology of geospatial analysis to carry out spatial analysis practice from three angles, so as to realize the expansion of functional analysis of urban planning and design and improve the efficiency and rationality of urban planning. The simulation results show that the automatic extraction algorithm of closed area boundary is effective and can support the functional analysis of urban planning and design expansion.

Export Citation Format

Share document.

Book cover

  • © 2020

Urban and Transit Planning

A Culmination of Selected Research Papers from IEREK Conferences on Urban Planning, Architecture and Green Urbanism, Italy and Netherlands (2017)

  • Hocine Bougdah 0 ,
  • Antonella Versaci 1 ,
  • Adolf Sotoca 2 ,
  • Ferdinando Trapani 3 ,
  • Marco Migliore 4 ,
  • Nancy Clark 5

University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, UK

You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

Universita degli Studi di Enna “Kore” – Cittadella Universitaria, Enna, Italy

Technische universität luleå, luleå, sweden, department of architecture, università degli studi di palermo, palermo, italy, università degli studi di palermo, palermo, italy.

School of Architecture, UF College of Design, Construction & Planning, Gainesville, USA

Provides clear approaches as to how urban design and architecture can be achieved

Presents examples of the ways to raise transportation efficiency

Showcases various case studies taken from diverse countries and cities

Part of the book series: Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation (ASTI)

91k Accesses

38 Citations

13 Altmetric

  • Table of contents

About this book

Editors and affiliations, about the editors, bibliographic information.

  • Publish with us

Buying options

  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check for access.

Table of contents (50 chapters)

Front matter, sustainability and the built environment, understanding streetscape design and temporary appropriation in latin american cities: the case of mexico city centre.

  • J. A. Lara-Hernandez, Alessandro Melis, Silvio Caputo

The Innovative and Sustainable Streetscape Design Based on Community Participation in Surabaya, Indonesia

  • Bambang Soemardiono, Murni Rachmawati

Ecological Urban Planning and Design Process with Strategic Planning Approach in Ünye City

  • Emrehan ÖZCAN, Sanem ÖZEN TURAN

“Kharja” the Lung of the Traditional House—The Case of Makkah

  • Faredah Mohsen Al-Murahhem

Building-Scaled Renovation: A BIM-Centered System Dynamics Modeling Approach

  • L. Burneau, P. Michel, B. Vinot

The Impacts of Sustainable Practices on Affordable Housing Developments: Residents’ Perspectives

Industrial ecologies: manufacturing the post-industrial landscape, built environment assessment of a disaster resilient university: a case study of the university of santo tomas.

  • Vinson Serrano, John Clemence Pinlac

Parametric Assessment for Achieving Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) in Egypt’s New Urban Communities: Considering New Borg El-Arab City Urban Morphology and Openings’ Specifications

  • Walaa El-Sayed Yoseph

Urban and Environmental Planning

Multi-functional urban greening: a policy review assessing the integration of urban agriculture into the urban planning system of punjab province, pakistan.

  • Hafiz Syed Hamid Arshad, Jayant Kumar Routray

Key Components for Delineating an Efficient Urban Development in Historic Towns: Stakeholders’ Perception

  • Thirumaran Kesavaperumal, Kiruthiga Kandasamy

Regional Resilience: An Urban Systems Approach

  • M. van Aswegen, J. E. Drewes, E. van der Linde

Highway Expansion and Crime: Challenges on Urban Development for Sustainability

  • J. Alexander Gómez, Errol Haarhoff, Emilio García

Transformations in Urban Mobility: A Smart Campus Proposal for Universidade Federal de Goias (Goiania/GO, Brazil)

  • Maria Natalia Paulino Araujo Alcantara, Erika Cristine Kneib

Planning for a Redevelopment of a Traditional Urban Village of Kampong Bharu, Kuala Lumpur: A Challenge for a Sustainable Future

  • Norsidah Ujang

Restructuring of Spatial Urban–Rural Linkages in the Syrian Coastal Region

  • Tarek Rahmoun, Wan Min Zhao

A Framework for Defining Innovation Districts: Case Study from 22@ Barcelona

  • Arnault Morisson

A volume of five parts, this book is a culmination of selected research papers from the second version of the international conferences on Urban Planning & Architectural Design for sustainable Development (UPADSD) and Urban Transit and Sustainable Networks (UTSN) of 2017 in Palermo and the first of the Resilient and Responsible Architecture and Urbanism Conference (RRAU) of 2018 in the Netherlands. This book, not only discusses environmental challenges of the world today, but also informs the reader of the new technologies, tools, and approaches used today for successful planning and development as well as new and upcoming ones. Chapters of this book provide in-depth debates on fields of environmental planning and management, transportation planning, renewable energy generation and sustainable urban land use. It addresses long-term issues as well as short-term issues of land use and transportation in different parts of the world in hopes of improving the quality of life. Topics within this book include: (1) Sustainability and the Built Environment (2) Urban and Environmental Planning (3) Sustainable Urban Land Use and Transportation (4) Energy Efficient Urban Areas & Renewable Energy Generation (5) Quality of Life & Environmental Management Systems. This book is a useful source for academics, researchers and practitioners seeking pioneering research in the field.

  • City Planning
  • Urban sustainability
  • Regional Planning
  • Environmental Planning
  • Logistics Networks
  • Urban Transportation
  • Energy efficient cities
  • landscape/regional and urban planning

Hocine Bougdah

Antonella Versaci

Adolf Sotoca

Ferdinando Trapani

Marco Migliore

School of Architecture, UF College of Design, Construction & Planning, Gainesville, USA

Nancy Clark

Hocine Bougdah  is a reader and subject area leader for Architectural Technology and the Environment in the School of Architecture, University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, UK. He has overall responsibility for the curriculum design, delivery and assessment of the subject area in the school at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels. His research interests focus on the technological, ecological and human/cultural aspects of sustainable architecture. His current research projects are interested in two facets of sustainable design. The first one is looking at low energy, low cost, low impact solutions (Projects include; the experimental low energy house and the use of PV panels for both energy efficiency and visual impact in newly built and refurbished buildings). The second aspect of his current research looks at the role of users as participants in the design/communication processes and community driven projects with a view to streamline the process and empower communities to address climate change mitigation (projects include; community driven projects in the global south, the role of culture in informing the design of urban dwellings, the use of interactive communication in the design process as a way for participatory design/consultation) and or both through the supervision of a number of researchers (currently 4) working on topics aligned with his research interests. Dr Bougdah is actively involved in scholarly activities through his membership of various learned societies (ACADIA, AHRA, IEREK) and editorial/review boards for a number of journals and international conferences ( Journal of Islamic Architecture , Environmental Science and Sustainable Development , Sustainability , Architecture and Culture , Plos One ,..). Alongside his academic role, he runs a design/consultancy practice.

Adolf Sotoca  has a PhD Architectue and Urbanism. He is currently a Chair Professor in Architecture at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden and a professor Serra Hunter at UPC_BarcelonaTECH of Spain. With clear passion for architecture, he enjoys sharing it with his students though his teachings of urban design studios and theory of architecture and urbanism for years. Professor Sotoca has been Visiting Professor at the Illinois School of Architecture (USA) and at CTU Krakow (Poland), as well as Guest Professor at NU Singapore, ETH Zürich, Berlage Institute Rotterdam, IUA di Venezia, Politecnico di Milano, TU Darmstadt and UAUIM Bucharest. He is also board member of several international institutions on Urbanism education, such as theInternational Forum of Urbanism and the European Postgraduate Master of Urbanism. His research interests currently lie on the regenerations of obsolete and declining residential areas and has taken the role of leading researcher on several EU projects. He is also co-founder and principal of CSAArquitectes, one of the leading offices on Urbanism in Barcelona which has received a number of prestigious prizes.

Ferdinando Trapani is an Architect and Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Polytechnic School of Palermo University (UNIPA), Italy. He received his Architecture Degree in 1986, his PhD in 1999 and became Researcher in Urban Planning in 2001. He is interested in the planning techniques for solving problems in urban & territorial regeneration and participation applications with ICT. Also, his research has been focused on the integration of spatial planning with economics and sustainable tourism in the relational way. He was member of the National Commission for Infrastructural Policies of the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica. As a result of his research, he is principal or co-principal investigator on more than 60 papers in several journals, more than 50 communications to international conferences, 2 books and more than 40 books chapters. Also, he was responsible for his Department of several European project in international partnerships regarding place based development policies. Currently, arch. Trapani is involved in the Erasmus Plus European project ‘Sustainable Management of Cultural Landscape’ as investigator of pilot case study, from 2015 is member of Regional Observatory of Landscape’s Quality, and an Editorial Board Member and reviewer for different international journals, an Editor for different books, member of an International Scientific Committee, a Chair of international conferences and an active member in different national associations.

Marco Migliore is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, Aerospace, Materials Engineering at University of Palermo, Italy. He received his Civil Engineering Degree with honor at University of Palermo in 1997 and his PhD in 2000. In 2000 was visiting researcher at the Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds (UK). He became researcher in 2000, associate professor in 2005. He teaches Transport System Theory, Transport Planning and Sustainable Mobility Policies, University of Palermo. He is member of the committee of the Doctorate in “Civil, Environmental, Materials Engineering”. He is currently the Coordinator of the Degree and of the Master Degree Course in Civil Engineering. He has carried out his scientific activity studying the supply and the demand transport models, for passengers and freights, and in particular the optimal design of the urban and regional transport network. He acts as frequent reviewer for high-impact scientific journals and he is an Editorial Board Member for an ISI international journal. He has participated in many prestigious conferences related to transport research topics. He has been responsible for 4 research projects related to transport planning, climate change and sustainable transport policies.

Antonella Versaci  is a researcher and assistant professor with more than 10 years of experience, at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at the University “Kore” of Enna. She is responsible of the “Laboratory of Restoration of Architectural and Cultural Heritage” and teaches “Architectural Restoration” and “Laboratory of Architectural Restoration” within the Master of Architecture. She is also an associate researcher at the Institut Parisien de Recherche Architecture Urbanistique Société (IPRAUS), a research laboratory of the ENSAPB – National Superior School of Architecture of Paris-Belleville (UMR 3329 Ausser). Her research applies to the issues of safeguarding and conservation of historic buildings and landscape, with particular attention to cultural heritage spread across the territory and to the protection of historic centers, as well as to their survey, diagnosis, classification and valorization. Professor Versaci is the author of over 90 refereed publications.

Book Title : Urban and Transit Planning

Book Subtitle : A Culmination of Selected Research Papers from IEREK Conferences on Urban Planning, Architecture and Green Urbanism, Italy and Netherlands (2017)

Editors : Hocine Bougdah, Antonella Versaci, Adolf Sotoca, Ferdinando Trapani, Marco Migliore, Nancy Clark

Series Title : Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17308-1

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Earth and Environmental Science , Earth and Environmental Science (R0)

Copyright Information : Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-17310-4 Published: 14 August 2020

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-17308-1 Published: 20 July 2019

Series ISSN : 2522-8714

Series E-ISSN : 2522-8722

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XII, 589

Number of Illustrations : 2 b/w illustrations, 397 illustrations in colour

Topics : Landscape/Regional and Urban Planning , Transportation Technology and Traffic Engineering , Sustainable Architecture/Green Buildings , Building Construction and Design , Urban Studies/Sociology , Sustainable Development

Policies and ethics

  • Find a journal
  • Track your research

U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

  • Publications
  • Account settings
  • Advanced Search
  • Journal List
  • Int J Environ Res Public Health

Logo of ijerph

Selected Research Issues of Urban Public Health

Associated data.

Not applicable.

Health is created within the urban settings of people’s everyday lives. In this paper we define Urban Public Health and compile existing evidence regarding the spatial component of health and disease in urban environments. Although there is already a substantial body of single evidence on the links between urban environments and human health, focus is mostly on individual health behaviors. We look at Urban Public Health through a structural lens that addresses health conditions beyond individual health behaviors and identify not only health risks but also health resources associated with urban structures. Based on existing conceptual frameworks, we structured evidence in the following categories: (i) build and natural environment, (ii) social environment, (iii) governance and urban development. We focused our search to review articles and reviews of reviews for each of the keywords via database PubMed, Cochrane, and Google Scholar in order to cover the range of issues in urban environments. Our results show that linking findings from different disciplines and developing spatial thinking can overcome existing single evidence and make other correlations visible. Further research should use interdisciplinary approaches and focus on health resources and the transformation of urban structures rather than merely on health risks and behavior.

1. Introduction

Urban Public Health gains in importance due to increasing health challenges of the ever-growing urban population. Many authors agree that we have entered the ‘urban age’ [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] despite the lack of consensus over the definition of urban areas [ 2 ]. Urban areas are the places and arenas of important societal changes and struggles around healthy environment, climate change, social justice, or the future of work and mobility. Urbanisation is coupled with different challenges related to Urban Public Health on the Global North (noncommunicable diseases and urban regeneration) and on the Global South (communicable diseases, urban expansion, and unfavourable living conditions) [ 4 ]. Multiple interdependencies on the global level influence cities and neighbourhoods that are local and context depended, but also local actions and activities may cause global crisis. Recognising the important role of urban setting, in the last decades, there have been calls to transform our cities into sustainable, healthy, and just places for global population [ 5 , 6 ]. Meanwhile, good health and wellbeing is one of the sustainable development goals (SDG3) [ 6 ], a cross-cutting issue of all other SDGs [ 7 ], of the New Urban Agenda [ 8 ], and a core issue in a recent publication from the UN-Habitat and World Health Organisation (WHO) on good planning of urban environments [ 9 ].

In view of global urbanization trends, the question how to shape urban environments should be closely linked to the health of the urban population [ 9 ]. Urban planning and governance have great impact on the distribution of health-promoting resources and on accumulation of risks that affect health of different population groups [ 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ] and contribute to both communicable and non-communicable diseases [ 18 ]. The importance of urban environments for health has been known since the ancient Greek city-states around 500 BC [ 19 , 20 ]. However, during the 20th century, health and disease were explored and practiced in a predominantly biomedical and individual-oriented approach. Lastly, with the Ottawa Charter (1986), a paradigm shift was initiated from an individual-oriented to a structural perspective emphasizing the importance of everyday settings in terms of health promotion [ 21 ]. Moreover, the Ottawa Charter shifted the focus from the causes of disease to a new understanding of health as resource and health promoting factor. The Charter emphasized for the first time that the responsibility for health also lies within many sectors besides health.

Meanwhile it is recognized that the urban living environment is not a self-contained, homogenous entity, but a complex system characterized by a number of different urban structures (e.g., educational, economic, mobility, political structures) that have their own dynamics and interact with each other in a complex urban grid. Thus, improving health and preventing disease in urban environments require genuinely joint efforts of different disciplines and sectors [ 22 ]. As an interdisciplinary research field, Urban Public Health attempts to address this need. The main aim of Urban Public Health is to explore the dimensions of health and disease in and by urban structures [ 15 ] (pp. 342–343). The international scientific debate, which operates primarily with the term Urban Health has its theoretical and disciplinary roots mainly in human ecology or medicine [ 10 , 23 , 24 ]. In contrast, we understand Urban Public Health explicitly as part of public health. This allows us to build on existing and well-established constructs and methods of public health, which include epidemiological tools. We extend the public health approach by linking it to the specific features of urban structures, paying particular attention to spatial relationships.

Addressing the spatial component allows insights into the distribution and constitution of health resources and risk factors in or by urban structures. The underlying question is how cities can be designed and (re)developed to create urban structures as health resources. Although there is already a substantial body of single evidence on the links between urban environments and human health, less is known regarding the specific connection between public health and place-based associations. We want to address this gap and explore in this paper the extent to which evidence on health effects of different urban structures contribute to Urban Public Health field by linking spatial approaches and public health.

Moreover, a conceptual overview of this fairly new field of Urban Public Health and its open research questions is still missing. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to review current evidence regarding the spatial component of health and disease in urban structures and to identify research issues, with particular attention to the links between public health and spatial perspectives from other disciplines such as urban planning, geography, social, and political science. In particular, our approach is not limited to looking at health outcomes and exposures, but rather we ask through a structural lens about the living conditions in urban environments beyond individual health behaviors. It is not within the scope of this article to comprehensively review findings for the entire field of Urban Public Health, but rather to present selected evidence from the view of the professional backgrounds of the authors, which is political science, urban planning, public health, and epidemiology. The aim is to provide a narrative towards new insights and possible research issues that can contribute to better understanding of the Urban Public Health challenges and potentials.

Categorization of Urban Public Health Issues

The complexity of interactions between urban environments and human health [ 25 ] is already conceptualized in several frameworks. Well-known ones are the Conceptual Framework for Urban Health [ 14 ] from Galea et al., the Health Map of Barton and Grant [ 11 ], and the illustration of Health Problems in different urban contexts from Rydin et al. [ 17 ]. A more recent example is the Conceptual Model of Key Drivers of Urban Health, Equity, and Sustainability [ 10 ]. They all describe, inter alia, how a variety of urban structures influences and shapes health and disease.

Based on these frameworks, we organized our review by selecting and categorizing Urban Public Health issues. We used three main categories: (i) build and natural environment , (ii) social environment , and (iii) governance and urban development . The first two categories include subcategories as listed in Table 1 . Since the transformation of urban environments into sustainable places and the shaping of health resources is to a considerable extent a matter of political negotiation processes, we defined the third category governance and urban development. This category goes across the first two categories. We compiled knowledge describing political structures that are shaping and influencing the built, natural, and social environments.

Selected categories of Urban Public Health.

The built and natural environment describes the physical-material level of urban structures as material expressions of human activity and societal constitution. Research here is concerned with relations between physical space and health. The social environment describes the characteristics and properties of communities in and by urban structures, the prevailing social norms, processes of exchange and interaction, and their relation to health. Aspects of the social and physical environment interact with each other and are interdependent [ 15 ]. How these environments interact with each other and how they are shaped largely takes place on the basis of prevailing governance structures.

This paper is divided into five sections. The next section introduces the methods we used to create a compilation, select papers, and analyze results. We then critically review and describe the selected categories of Urban Public Health. This is followed by the discussion and more detailed examination of existing gaps. We conclude with the most critical aspects and recommendations for future research.

2. Materials and Methods

In order to narrow down the project we proceeded in three steps. In step 1, we outlined the conceptual approach for our review by using frameworks addressing urban space as a contributing factor for health [ 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. In step 2, we categorized the main topics of Urban Public Health, and used them to assign and compile the articles in step 3. Between February and May 2021 we screened the literature by performing a snowball approach in the databases PubMed, Cochrane, and Google Scholar (a tabular overview of the main literature for analysis can be found in the Appendix A , Table A1 ). As a restriction, the language filter was set to English. The methodical approach and search strategy of the narrative review is also illustrated in Figure 1 . Instead of reviewing singular results of studies on single public health aspects of urban environments, we focused our search to existing review articles and reviews of reviews for each of the used keywords in order to cover the range of issues in urban environments. The study area is focused on developed countries. We used the main keywords “Urban”, “Public Health”, and “Urban Health”. The search was refined by varying terms and combinations using predefined specific keywords ( Figure 2 ).

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is ijerph-19-05553-g001.jpg

Methodical approach and search strategy for the narrative review.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is ijerph-19-05553-g002.jpg

Keywords of database research and research strategy.

The results were filtered by the first author by screening article titles and abstracts to determine: (a) if they address the spatial component of health risks and resources of urban structures, and (b) if they considered the link between public health and urban spaces. As a result of this screening, 183 papers were selected for a complete in-depth reading. According to the abovementioned criteria, (a) and (b), the final articles were selected for analysis. Finally, we included 120 papers for our review. As our approach is not a systematic review, we refrained from independent assessment of identified reviews. This approach has some limitations: important scientific contributions may be missed due to the selection criteria, e.g., (i) the selection of key words; (ii) the missing double check of excluded articles; (iii) by opting for English-language articles only. However, overall, this approach allowed us to explicitly address prevailing research strands and broad lines of Urban Public Health in order to identify existing research gaps at a more fundamental level.

3.1. Built and Natural Environment

3.1.1. overarching issues.

The built form of the city is a visible expression of the complex urban structures and socio-cultural characteristics of the heterogeneous population. Evidence shows that urban environment has direct and indirect impacts on physical and mental health [ 26 , 27 ]. However, urban environment is also conditioned by understandings of health in the sense of socio-cultural and historical specifications of health, which have constitutive effects on the built form [ 20 , 23 ]. Main characteristics of the built environment that are related to the population health are: buildings and density, land use, scale of streets and streets network, local facilities (services and retail), and public open spaces [ 11 , 14 ]. Mix of land uses, as well as design and maintenance of the urban environment, may support a healthy lifestyle and contribute to improved physical and mental health [ 28 ]. Design strategies determine the connection between morphological and functional features of urban environment that may provide opportunities for public health promotion and protection [ 29 ], but if inadequate, may also impair health. It has been well known that aspects such as high density, inadequate housing, and poor water supply and sanitation promote vector proliferation [ 30 ]. In the last decades, non-communicable diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and mental health problems, are taking over the vector diseases [ 31 , 32 , 33 ] and can be associated with the build environment [ 34 , 35 ].

Although there is a general trend of increasing life expectancy [ 31 , 36 ] (p. 29), substantial inequalities in life expectancy between deprived and privileged neighborhoods still remain a challenge [ 37 ]. In particular, socioeconomic inequalities in relation to different components of the built environment have come to the fore. For example, Gelormino et al. [ 38 ] highlight key features of the built environment that shape the health of its inhabitants. However, these key features are unequally distributed and closely related to socioeconomic status [ 38 ]. Moreover, Dendup et al. [ 39 ] show in their review associations between development of Type 2 Diabetes mellitus and a health promoting urban environment, such as walkability, air quality, opportunities to easily purchase healthy foods and a range of facilities for physical activity. However, they acknowledge that there is still a lack of evidence on the influence of socioeconomic or demographic factors on the relationship between the environment and type 2 diabetes. Beyond diabetes, mixed land use, pedestrian and bicycle-friendly infrastructure, and street connectivity, as well as green and open spaces also have positive connotations with physical health [ 40 ].

Since the adoption of the SDGs in 2015, there has been a more explicit need to link Urban Public Health with the debate around the ecological crisis and sustainable development. Increased attention is being paid to the potential positive synergies between climate mitigation and adaptation measures and health resources [ 27 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 ]. Reduction of automotive traffic, initiatives for more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly urban and transportation planning, and the importance of green and blue infrastructure for the improvement of air quality are further examples of such synergies [ 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 ]. Possible interventions for more urban green space, for example, are evaluated in terms of co-benefits for climate resilience and human health [ 49 ]. Specifically in deprived neighborhoods, interventions should enable access to affordable quality housing, various local facilities, quality open spaces and various mobility options [ 53 ]. The Corona pandemic has increased awareness of the importance of quality housing, public spaces, and urban greenery. Questions about the post-Corona city should be linked to questions about health promoting, sustainable, and climate-resilient urban transition [ 54 , 55 ] and reduction of inequalities.

3.1.2. Housing Conditions

Since the pioneering work of social medicine in the 19th century, the spread of communicable diseases has been greatly curbed in industrialized countries [ 56 , 57 , 58 ]. The catastrophic living and sanitary conditions at the beginning of industrialization [ 59 ] have been largely remedied. Meanwhile, following classical problems of hygiene and changing living conditions, other factors have come to the foreground. It is now evident, that physical factors such as temperature, air humidity and ventilation, and building materials contaminated with pollutants have an impact on respiratory health [ 60 , 61 ]. Parasites, fungi, and other pollutants have been known to cause asthma and allergies since the 1980s [ 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 ]. At the same time, indirect, intangible factors of housing also have an impact on health [ 66 , 67 ]: the home is perceived as a place of refuge, security, and privacy. It is a constant, a space of daily routines and control over one’s own life, an identity-forming place, possibly tied to social norms and status symbols [ 66 ]. The consequences of losing these factors have an impact on health, especially in extreme cases of homelessness [ 67 ]. Beyond the evidence that housing conditions are associated with various diseases, these are not simple cause-and-effect relationships, but a complex network of effects [ 68 ]. These effects not only translate into increased costs for the health care system, but may also create additional costs in education, crime management, or energy supply [ 68 ].

Thus, socioeconomic aspects and the social production of health inequalities are increasingly research issues [ 69 ] (pp. 360–361). Almost twenty years after the Ottawa Charter, Mary Shaw still states that despite the strong historical links between housing conditions and health, too much attention is still paid to factors of individual behavior rather than environmental and socioeconomic structures, and that increasing income inequality is inseparable from the problem of lack of affordable housing [ 67 ] (p. 414). Numerous factors of poor housing conditions are beyond the direct influence of those who are affected, so an effective solution to these problems must be located at a structural level.

Given the recognition that sociodemographic and socioeconomic conditions may have a stronger influence on poor housing than has long been assumed, there is a need for a fundamental revision of previous (primarily biomedical) established research approaches and methods that justify the link between health, urban planning, social and environmental policy [ 70 ]. This would also contribute to more optimal use of available resources [ 60 ].

3.1.3. Mobility and Transport Infrastructures

Urban mobility, connectivity and infrastructure are particularly intertwined with urban development and planning. The orientation of urban planning towards the car-friendly city since the 1960s has meanwhile revealed some downsides from the Urban Public Health perspective. The strong research focus since the 1990s on air pollution, (allergic) respiratory diseases, cancer risks, traffic accidents, and possible interventions are expressions of an emerging critique of urban car traffic [ 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 ]. The use of research findings from other disciplines is being embraced by Urban Public Health; in particular, the use of transportation and planning research to examine the impact of land use and design on public health [ 78 ]. This is due to the recognition that urban and traffic planning of the past decades has “engineered physical activity out of our daily lives.” [ 78 ] (p. 89) Urban Public Health perspectives increasingly advocate for urban planning that considers and promotes improving air quality, solving traffic congestion, and increasing overall quality of life in an integrated manner: “Health researchers need to become more involved in environmental research and policy studies, discussion, and decisions about environmental factors […]” [ 78 ] (p. 89).

In addition to reduced physical activity, high traffic volume and speeds reduce social contact and contact to goods and services [ 79 ]. Transportation infrastructure can connect or disconnect society and thus have impact on social integration, cohesion, and public health [ 79 ]. Street connectivity, mixed land use, access to public transportation, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, short distances, and traffic safety have been recommended to promote public health and are recognized as effective strategies in creating healthy and sustainable compact cities [ 35 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 ].

3.1.4. Digitalization

In addition to these facets of infrastructure issues, the most recent aspect is that of digitalization and its potentials and risks for public health and sustainable cities. A lot of potential is seen with regard to health care and the field of eHealth, e.g., smart hospital or an electronic patient record [ 85 ]. Digitalization can support the transition from cure to prevention, patients’ empowerment, or healthcare efficiency [ 86 ]. The smart city research offers possible synergies with Urban Public Health: sharing economy, electrification and automation, digitalization of different infrastructures can create co-benefits for public health in the form of reduced CO 2 emissions, new uses for freed-up space, increased traffic space [ 87 , 88 ]. However, technical or even economic barriers to access must be considered as potential disadvantages for more health equity [ 89 ]. The question arises about the effects associated with digitalization processes in regard to urban spaces and possible rebound or even negative effects, which must be taken into account. In particular, answering questions about equity, access, (resource-related) sustainability, and the benefits for society will fail without an interdisciplinary approach. Urban Public Health is therefore confronted with the large topic of digitalization as science as a whole. As a phenomenon of societal scale, digitalization is one of the megatrends of the 21st century and potentially generates a great need for research in almost all settings, urban spaces and areas of life.

3.1.5. Climate Change

The discourse around sustainability and the increasing pressure on cities to act, both as a main driver of climate change and as the main addressees for implementing counter-measures, are closely related to the health of the population. Starting with the first United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference in Rio de Janeiro back in 1992, following the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, and the Paris Agreement of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—cities have become major players in a large-scale socio-ecological transformation.

In the 1990s and early 2000s considerable evidence was generated on the urban environment and the negative health effects of air, water, and soil pollution, noise, exposure to bacteria, viruses, pesticides, and toxins [ 90 , 91 , 92 ]. Today, this research is integrated into the broader debate on climate change and ecological crisis, that is largely framed around the issues of mobility, resource, and energy transition [ 49 , 93 ]. Climate change favors the mitigation of invasive and potentially health-threatening species, such as Ambrosia in Central Europe or other potentially allergenic plants. Additionally, the predicted increase in vector-based diseases and zoonosis (malaria, dengue fever, rabies, coronaviruses, etc.) are threats to human health [ 94 ]. Both increasing urbanization and climate change will further intensify these risks [ 95 ]. The appropriate response to these problems raises questions regarding effective interventions: integrated vector management that likewise promotes environmental management, education and awareness, and inter-sectoral collaboration is considered effective and sustainable [ 96 , 97 , 98 ]. The systematic and regular monitoring of interventions, strategies with more political commitment and social mobilization, exchange of experience and data, pooling of resources, and cooperation would be crucial approaches [ 99 ]. Overall, research addressing the health-promoting components of (urban) nature increased, especially in the context of climate mitigation and adaptation measures.

3.1.6. Urban Nature and Ecosystems

Green and blue infrastructures and nature-based solutions offer great potential to be beneficial in three ways: in terms of ecological sustainability, as a health resource, and for greater health equity [ 49 , 100 ]. The health promoting effects of nature and ecosystem services are broadly positioned, e.g., stress-reducing effects, increased physical activity, reducing effects on cardiovascular diseases, and improved mental health [ 101 , 102 , 103 , 104 ]. The so-called view that greenery has a relaxing and stress-reducing effect [ 105 , 106 , 107 ]. Further potential ecosystem services are: food; air quality regulation; climate regulation; water treatment; moderation of disturbance events; erosion prevention; maintenance of soil fertility; maintenance of life cycles and genetic diversity; but also inspiration for culture, art and design; information for cognitive development [ 103 ]. Availability, accessibility, but also aesthetics are relevant factors for the active use of urban green areas [ 108 , 109 ]. These findings are worth paying much more attention to the synergies and co-benefits of climate research and health research. Future intervention efforts should focus on these benefits. Or in other words: “It seems reasonable to invest in urban natural environments as a general public health intervention” [ 101 ] (p. 381). Urban Public Health could make an important research contribution here, e.g., on questions of the specific design of green spaces, taking into account aspects of access, safety, and quality; or also on questions of the relationship between the degree of biodiversity and human health. In addition, ecological inequalities and environmental justice have received insufficient attention in green space management and urban planning and there is minor attention regarding the links between availability, accessibility, and quality of urban green and socioeconomic inequalities [ 110 ] as well as green gentrification.

3.2. Social Environment

3.2.1. overarching issues.

The question of the role of social factors in public health is not new and the associations between poverty, inequality, and lack of education and health are supported with rich evidence [ 111 ]. In this paper, these aspects are always considered as crosscutting issues in the social, built and natural environments. The genuinely social-spatial perspective of Urban Public Health, which is inextricably linked to social structures, can broaden the field of research on the social determinants of health. In this sense, Urban Public Health asks about the social structures in a city that shapes the lives of the population, combined with physical structures and their evolution through urbanization itself. In this respects, the socio-spatial and physical structures, as well as urban transformation itself, are investigated as linked to each other. Factors such as demography and inequalities are of particular relevance here.

Apparently, different age groups have partly different demands and needs on their physical environments, e.g., on housing conditions, mobility, or access to public space [ 112 ]. Further studies are needed to achieve evidence-based health promotion recommendations that address these needs while tackling inequities [ 113 , 114 , 115 , 116 , 117 , 118 ].

Tailoring health programs to meet specific needs of population groups (e.g., ethnic, age, gender, minorities) is a recognized key principle of health promotion [ 119 ]. Nevertheless, it remains a challenge to ensure barrier- and discrimination-free access to health resources for all population groups [ 119 ]. Analyzing health disparities along different indicators is thus an important research focus. In that sense, classical demographic indicators, as well as socioeconomic and socio-cultural indicators and their interconnections with structural factors and the physical environment can help to deconstruct identified disparities and inequalities in urban spaces [ 120 ].

3.2.2. Segregation and Gentrification

Socioeconomic disparities and sociocultural differences can be translated in spatial differences [ 57 , 58 , 121 ]. The connection of social, built, and natural environments is well visible when looking at processes of segregation and gentrification. In the United States, there exists a long-standing research tradition that focuses on aspects of segregation, persistent disadvantage of low-income minority neighborhoods, and racism [ 122 , 123 ]. Racism and discrimination and their manifestation in social structures, condition a range of health consequences and inequalities on at least three levels: “institutionalized policies and practices that maintain racial disadvantage, individual racial discrimination and biased treatment, and internalized cognitive processes” [ 124 ] (p. 1140). Systematic housing discrimination and racialized policies that inhibit homeownership for certain population groups have left many neighborhoods in U.S. cities isolated and revealed a geographic pattern of residential segregation [ 125 ]. In order to mitigate social and economic adversity, alternative networks or informal structures are often formed in affected neighborhoods to secure the material resources for these disadvantaged population groups. Although segregated, these neighborhoods can show strong internal integration since the homogenous milieu offers social embedding [ 126 ]. The centrality of urban land use policies and urban planning for urban public health is visible in such segregation processes and effects [ 34 ]. Political decisions about urban planning and development can counteract such processes, or it can stimulate them even further.

Programs and interventions that attempt to break up such structures try to create mixed-income communities, and revitalize disadvantaged urban areas through targeted reinvestment. However, these interventions are often accompanied by adverse effects such as the displacement of low-income urban residents who can no longer afford the rent in revitalized neighborhoods [ 127 ]. In such cases, the health of the domestic population will not improve; in fact, it causes stress and illness due to gentrification effects. As a result, the problem is not solved but rather shifted to other neighborhoods. The health equity perspective is often neglected in urban and housing policies, and the importance of the structural context that had led to segregated neighborhoods is often obscured in public discourse [ 127 ]. Tulier et al. [ 122 ] explored this problem and identified four relevant aspects: (1) neighborhood attributes (infrastructure, economic opportunities/development, social cohesion); (2) individual mechanisms of change (individual health protective resources within a neighborhood experiencing gentrification); (3) neighborhood and individual level mechanisms (economic opportunities and growth, financial status); (4) the role of political and economic institutions (shaping the relationship between gentrification and health).

Gentrification and urban or regional transitions require a deeper understanding of complex macrosocial phenomena and their influence on public health. Studies from the U.S. show that gentrification and displacement are among the most important neighborhood challenges and most common structural psychosocial stressors [ 125 ]. Moreover, gentrification and displacement often reinforce and perpetuate existing power structures and asymmetries [ 123 ]. For this reason, more attention is necessary on the mediating factors of neighborhood change and health, both those that hinder and those that promote health equity.

3.2.3. Social Cohesion and Networks

Community characteristics of neighborhoods, their importance for physical and mental health of the inhabitants, and the creation of mixed communities are among the approaches to health-promoting urban development [ 128 , 129 , 130 , 131 ]. In neighborhoods with weak social cohesion, high levels of violence, and lack of safety, residents are more likely to experience health risks such as sleep deprivation, depression, lack of physical activity, or use of addictive substances [ 132 , 133 , 134 , 135 , 136 ]. Social cohesion thus represents a relevant attribute for health-promoting neighborhoods [ 135 ]. Approaches to strengthening social networks and social connectivity is thus increasingly attracting the attention of Urban Public Health [ 134 ]. Social cohesion in neighborhoods is closely linked to the built environment and to issues such as mobility and infrastructure as connecting or dividing elements (e.g., intimidating spaces: poorly planned and abandoned places, underpasses, heavily travelled roads). However, associations between social cohesion, health, and urban environments deserve more interdisciplinary research attention [ 136 ].

3.2.4. Economic Opportunities and Working Conditions

The urban form, as well as urbanization and urban transformation are largely driven and influenced by economic structures. Urban Public Health has so far paid little attention to these structures, although economic deprivation is recognized as a key driver for health inequalities. The strong correlation between income and health status is transmitted through employment status and contextualized by factors such as gender identity, ethnicity, immigration status, and social class [ 137 , 138 ]. Employment can provide financial security, strengthened social relationships, and increased social status, while precarious employment can also negatively affect all these factors [ 137 , 138 ].

Martins [ 139 ] sees the issue of work and employment as relevant to the development of healthy cities in three ways: (i) Urban Economies , (ii) Place(s) of Work , and (iii) Work/Economy on Place . (i) Urban Economies describe the respective degree of diversity of the economic urban system and the mix of production activities of the existing economic sectors, and the extent to which this results in employment opportunities. For example, topics such as local economic development and alternative economies, how it is discussed from the scientific community on sustainable transformation. In addition, processes of structural change in coal regions has implications for health, as well as the future of work in the face of advancing digitalization. (ii) Place(s) of Work describe the analyses of location and spatial distribution of work, related to work routes and movement spaces, and the quality of workspace. This includes new forms of workspaces or alternative/multiple use possibilities, e.g., due digitalization processes. This is followed by the dimension of (iii) Work/Economy in Place, which deals with the shaping of cities or neighborhoods by economy. Retail, which established itself in the city center and thereby promotes social activities and vivid urban life, is related to different consequences when these structures disappear.

Although there is ample evidence of the health effects of economic factors, including employment, an interdisciplinary research approach is needed to generate more knowledge on the links between the economy and health-promoting urban development. In particular, the multi-layered relations between space, employment, urban economy, and health are not limited to the local level of a city or a neighborhood, but are rather integrated in different spatial scales. Furthermore, integrated approaches need to study different economic sectors, and their structures of production and consumption, taking into account aspects of availability and access [ 140 , 141 ].

3.3. Governance and Urban Development

Urban governance and development policies shape urban environments and thus effect health. The importance of health policies action that improves urban public health, particularly aiming to reduce inequalities, is emphasized [ 142 ]. Data-based information assessed, e.g., by monitoring, surveillance, or health impact assessments are basic tools for an evidence based policy [ 10 ]. Analyses of the WHO’s Healthy Cities Network shows that cooperation between cities as well as between the various sectors within the city is a key element to tackle inequalities and promote good governance and leadership for health and wellbeing [ 143 , 144 , 145 , 146 ]. The benefits and positive contribution of such cooperation networks through mutual knowledge exchange and testing of municipal strategies and interventions have become visible [ 147 , 148 ]. The network has also brought much greater focus to the close linkages between urban development and health, effectively contributing to the dissemination of good practice [ 149 ].

Nevertheless, there remains an implementation gap between internationally formulated goals and the actual transformation of our cities. Despite positive developments, this implementation gap, and the successful setting of a strategic and holistic approach in the sense of Health in All Policies remains a demanding field of health research. Internal institutional barriers, competing interests, hegemonic values, norms, and processing practices block the path to the policy agenda [ 149 , 150 , 151 , 152 ]. Against this background, Urban Public Health has increasingly turned to questions of governance and participation to elevate the potential of broadly involving relevant stakeholders and strengthening participatory processes as effective levers for transforming urban structures and spaces. While citizen participation in designing and implementing health resources, considered a recognized feature of best practice, rarely extends beyond the planning stage [ 153 ]. Better understanding of existing governance structures requires more analyses “of the historical, social, and economic processes that have characterized social relations and citizenship in specific local, national, and global contexts” [ 151 ] (p. 897), to make the production and reproduction of (power) structures recognizable [ 151 ].

4. Discussion

The aim of this paper was to compile current evidence regarding the spatial component of health and disease in urban structures and to identify research issues, which are addressing Urban Public Health. Our approach was expanded through a structural lens to the living conditions in urban environments beyond individual health behaviors. Based on an ex-ante developed conceptual approach, we defined selected categories of Urban Public Health to be used for synthesis of the literature. According to these categories, our review emphasizes both the positive and negative impacts of urban structures on health and linkages between urban structures.

With regard to the selected research issues and urban environments, a wide range of further research needs become visible:

  • A need for more research on the political structures that impact public health, urban spaces, and the underlying (power) structures.
  • With respect to the built and natural environment, there is a need for epidemiological and public health research to link dimensions of the social environment with different spatial scales.
  • The housing issue is still predominantly focused on individual behavior instead of exploring socioeconomic structures. Especially the growing pressure on the housing market, cannot be handled by individuals, but must be answered structurally.
  • Digitalization processes and concepts such as smart cities need to be critically questioned and studied for their potential as health resources.
  • More evidence is required regarding the needs for, quality of, and access to urban nature for all population groups.
  • Place-based interventions, which promote and maintain health need to be developed, monitored and evaluated to obtain evidence on health impacts on different population groups in a city.
  • Aspects of segregation and gentrification as well as the role of social networks and social cohesion require further evidence on health impacts. Special attention is necessary on the mediating factors of neighborhood change and health.
  • It is crucial to take into account both negative and positive factors for health promotion and equity.
  • The identification and assessment of dynamic relationships and complex causal processes that shape urban environments [ 125 ].
  • Urban production and consumption structures, transformation processes of economic structures, economic opportunities in cities and neighborhoods, and their implications for health is a further identified research strand for Urban Public Health.

From a more overarching point of view and the perspective of health promotion, it is essential to include interventions that change urban structures, complementary to the ones that change individual behavior. In addition to analyzing risk factors, it is necessary to analyze urban structures in order to identify deep-seated causes of health and disease [ 154 ]. This includes the question of whether and to what extent certain urban systems are health maintaining and/or promoting in their current constitution or what is necessary to bring forth health-promoting potential. Moreover, since urban development is impacted at different scales—from local to global—further phenomena such as globalized markets and resource flows, digitalization and mechanization, migration movements, and climate change need to be examined in terms of Urban Public Health. Especially major issues of this century—urbanization, climate change, and digitalization—have so far been considered from a health perspective only to a limited extent. In particular, the climate crisis is addressed by public health, mainly in terms of risks caused by extreme weather events or invasive species causing (new) infectious diseases. It is essential, however, that Urban Public Health plays a stronger role in shaping climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. Its expertise can and must contribute to urban transformation pathways in terms of social, health, and environmental sustainability. In particular, it must bring in the perspective that urban structures serve also as health resources. In this sense, Urban Public Health has to deal with the challenges of urbanization and the complexity of urban structures.

Another challenge is the categorization of the different environments, as carried out by existing conceptual approaches. Categorization is helpful for systematization and greater clarity. However, it can lead to a pillarization of research with partly disciplinary hegemonies, although there are examples that demonstrated the connections and constitutive relationship between urban environments. A systemic approach is necessary to dissolve this pillar structure, address the complexity of urban structures and to advance public health. We argue that Urban Public Health should take this systemic approach and broaden the existing approaches of public health. Because although public health is already an interdisciplinary field of research, it lacks a broader view with regard to the city and urban environments that the spatial perspective can provide. Existing evidence has provided insights into the different dimensions of health and disease and their distribution in different settings. Now, the task of Urban Public Health is to increasingly contextualize and link these findings. Linking findings, also from different disciplines, and developing spatial thinking can overcome existing single evidence and make other correlations visible, which can then also enable new approaches for interventions. Based on this, Urban Public Health should intensify its research regarding the identification of the causes of health and disease through production and appropriation of space, resulting health outcomes, and their distribution. This research perspective could make a helpful contribution and address Urban Public Health understandings that are still missing or only partly explored. This includes, first, the approach of making health resources of urban structures an explicit research issue, in addition to health risks. Second, it includes research approaches that address urban living conditions and contexts, paying particular attention to spatial relationships, rather than individual health behavior. Third, and here we come more to a conceptual understanding of Urban Public Health, there is a need to develop conceptual approaches to link the public health perspective with spatial perspectives from other scientific disciplines.

5. Conclusions

Health takes place within and between urban structures. This makes Urban Public Health a complex and hard-to-grasp field of research. Research to date has already brought much to light in the issues of health risks, but still shows potential in exploring the issues of health resources. This requires interdisciplinary cooperation between public health and various other disciplines, and the development of a common spatial perspective in order to be able to specifically analyze spatial components of health and disease in urban structures. A systemic approach is necessary to develop an understanding of urban development challenges and address complex urban structures that influence health. Urban Public Health, as an interdisciplinary field, can enable different disciplines to incorporate in their approaches an understanding of public health and especially its broadened understanding of health as resource.

This is a perspective that should also be increasingly taken into account in (urban) politics and policy making. A modified understanding of health and the idea of health resources can be made fruitful for cities and urban development. In particular, concepts such as sustainability strategies, climate protection and climate adaptation plans should integrate such a health perspective across all fields of action—in line with the WHO’s Health in All Policies approach.

Focus on health resources and the transformation of urban structures rather than behavior, opens up remarkable potential for an overall societal change. Urban Public Health should contribute to urban environments, which maintain and promote health and make the city a healthy, just, and sustainable place. A perspective of Urban Public Health, as presented in this paper, means to give the inhabitants of a city the opportunity to shape their living environment in a self-determined and healthy way. Moreover, it would enable structural alternatives to the dominant pathogenic understanding of health and the health care system. This implies nothing less than raising and advancing the emancipatory potential for free and equal urban inhabitants [ 20 ].

Main Literature for analysis.

Funding Statement

This research received no external funding.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, resources, data curation, and writing—original draft preparation, J.S. (Judith Schröder); conceptualization, writing—review and editing, supervision, S.M. and J.S. (Julita Skodra). All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cogitatio Logo

Urban Planning

Open access journal, issn: 2183-7635.

Check out our latest project

Let's Talk About

  • Other Journals

Journal Citation Reports 2022 Impact Factor

SCImago Journal & Country Rank

SCImago Journal & Country Rank

Next Issues

With our plurithematic issues we intended to draw the attention of researchers, policy-makers, scientists and the general public to some of the topics of highest relevance. Scholars interested in guest editing a thematic issue of Urban Planning are kindly invited to contact the Editorial Office of the journal ( [email protected] ).

Published Thematic Issues are available here .

Upcoming Issues

  • Vol 9:  Children’s Wellbeing in the Post-Pandemic City: Design, Planning, and Policy Challenges
  • Vol 9:  Transformative Local Governments: Addressing Social Urban Challenges by Bringing People and Politics Together
  • Vol 9:  Housing Affordability Crisis: How Can We Address It?
  • Vol 9:  Co-Production in the Urban Setting: Fostering Definitional and Conceptual Clarity Through Comparative Research
  • Vol 9:  Housing Norms and Standards: The Design of Everyday Life
  • Vol 9:  Urban Borderlands: Difference, Inequality, and Spatio-Temporal In-Betweenness in Cities
  • Vol 9:  Post-Socialist Neoliberalism and the Production of Space
  • Vol 9:  Urban In/Formalities: How Arrival Infrastructures Shape Newcomers’ Access To Resources
  • Vol 9:  Urban Shrinkage, Degrowth, and Sustainability: How Do They Connect in Urban Planning?
  • Vol 9:  Planning and Managing Climate and Energy Transitions in Ordinary Cities
  • Vol 9:  Industrial Heritage and Cultural Clusters: More Than a Temporary Affair?
  • Vol 10:  Place-Shaping Through and With Time: Urban Planning as a Temporal Art and Social Science
  • Vol 10:  Future Urban Sustainability: Lessons Learnt From the SDGs and Perspectives for a Post-2030 Agenda
  • Vol 10:  Smart and Resilient Infrastructure in the Wake of Climate Change
  • Vol 10:  Understanding Change in Urban Food Environments: The Contemporary Challenges of Conceptualization, Definition, and Measurement
  • Vol 10:  Perspectives on Food in the Sustainable City
  • Vol 10:  AI for and in Urban Planning
  • Vol 10:  Public Urban Cultures of Care
  • Vol 10:  The Role of Participatory Planning and Design in Addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals
  • Vol 10:  Co-Creation With Emerging Technologies to Address Climate Challenges in Cities
  • Vol 10:  Walkability: From Spatial Analytics to Urban Coding and Actual Walking
  • Vol 10:  Planning for Locally Embedded Economies in the Productive City
  • Vol 10:  The Role of Planning in 'Anti-Democratic' Times
  • Vol 11:  Geogames: The Future’s Language of Urban and Regional Planning

The discussion about children as users of the city is even more urgent at this moment, since the experience of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic has showed very vividly how important public urban spaces are to all citizens, children in particular. The closing down of play-spaces brought about the realization that urban space needs to be reshaped giving children equal share. Streets, sidewalks, public spaces are the “fourth environment” for kids growing up and should be designed as such. In many cities around the world, emergency responses to the pandemic have included giving priority to children as users of open spaces. Indeed, the pandemic has made visible the importance of designing urban neighborhoods, in their entirety, with children in mind, and not only spaces specifically designed for children.

The quest for a truly “childhood city” (Karsten, 2002) is still quite elusive, but of extreme urgency, if we are to escape the present-day domestication of play, children’s growing addiction to screens, and the resulting impact on children’s physical and mental health as well as the alarming disconnection of children from nature. As urban designers, we need to address children as citizens with equal rights (if the premises of UNCRC are to be realized) and at the same time make cities more livable for all. To do this, we need a holistic approach, a multi-scale coordinated effort, from the macroscale, policy level to the organization of districts and neighborhoods and the physical design of streets, school areas, and open spaces. As urbanization rates continue to soar, humanity’s own existence and survival in the age of the Anthropocene depends on how children will relate to cities. If they experience them as friendly, welcoming, and nature-inclusive, they will love them as adults—and this is what, ultimately, urban design should aim for.

Contributors are asked to address (one of) the following questions:

  • How do children experience the city?
  • How safely and independently can they get around?
  • Where can children play and gather? What is the role of play in the city?
  • Are children’s needs and opinions taken into account in urban design? How can children participate in the design process?
  • How can cities “use” children to their benefit to become more livable for all?

Both theoretical and case-study based approaches are welcome.

We live in a rapidly urbanizing world where many cities are facing a housing affordability crisis. There is a shortage of all types of housing and a severe shortage of affordable housing in urban areas. Housing affordability is context sensitive and dependent on the type of development and the jurisdiction, however, housing cost burden is distributed unevenly across households of different income and ethnicity. Addressing the housing needs of different types of households—from families with children to the elderly, and especially low-income households—is important for the planning and development of cities.

There is an ongoing debate on the barriers to housing supply. Several studies have examined regulatory barriers that contribute to housing shortage. Some researchers contend that the strictness of land use regulations, limited availability of developable land, and environmental laws are correlated with high housing prices. Others have explained that non-regulatory barriers and challenges, such as community opposition to higher-density housing projects as well as the cost and availability of labor and construction materials, also contribute to housing affordability crisis. Advocacy groups assert that housing is a human right. Given this, how might we address the housing affordability crisis?

Proposals are invited for a thematic issue of Urban Planning, a peer-reviewed open access journal, to explore the theme of housing affordability crisis. Researchers could, for instance, examine the following types of questions: What are the causes and consequences of housing affordability crisis? How might state laws and local government policies address the problem? Contributions also could be based on case studies that examine housing development projects and related concerns of loss of sense of place, gentrification, and displacement as well as apprehensions of projects’ impact on traffic, environmental quality, property value, and neighborhood character.

Cities change and face various challenges that are increasingly complex, intractable, persistent, and not amenable to simple solutions. What is more, when governments prove to be incapable of being the only possible supplier of public goods and services, collaborative forms of public service delivery gain significance. This phenomenon is known as co-production and refers to the collaboration between service professionals and users in the design and delivery of public goods and services. Co-production also represents an increasingly apparent mode of engagement with public agencies. Underlying co-production is the idea that networks of public, private, and non-public organisations and partnerships with citizens can increase context-specific and effective solutions while maintaining the public values. Although co-production has often been associated with the delivery of public goods and services, at its core it remains a concept that refers to all phases of delivery processes: co-planning (co-design), co-testing, co-financing, and co-evaluation. Thereby, it aims to create win-win situations that are beneficial for all as cities adapt, transition, or transform into more sustainable and desirable futures.

As interest in co-production grows, however, so does the sense of unclarity for the concept. This unclarity might be rooted in a spectrum of participants or be reflective of the diverse phases of the processes co-production features. Following the argument that this lack of clarity requires attention, this thematic issue seeks to foreground methodologically comparative approaches to study co-production as a way to sharpen understandings and definition of differences and commonalities that might enhance the concept of co-production. These can include, but are not limited to, frameworks and heuristics covering intra-, cross-case variations in single or multiple case studies. To illustrate, distinguishing or discussing actors, modes, or phases of co-productive processes could be points of entry for such comparative insights.

Housing design is greatly informed by social and cultural norms or expectations around home use and everyday life. This thematic issue examines the interrelationships between social norms, cultural expectations, home use, everyday life, and lived experiences to technical housing standards and design outcomes. It is interested in how a socio-technical discourse can produce new insights, evidence, or analytical frameworks for housing and design research studies.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the use and space of homes were extensively studied, with analysis frequently combining design research, qualitative, and statistical methods. These studies became formative to technical standards, design companions, and typical design solutions that determined the way housing is designed and delivered. For example, graphical and dimensional methods of assessing plan layouts based on furniture and movement requirements are still in use today as part of space standards to regulate minimum dwelling sizes, dimensions, and functionality.

Interactions between norms and standards are contextual to different periods, regions, and cultures. How domestic practices and uses become normative and translated into technical standards can thus greatly vary. While housing priorities and lifestyles continuously change, significant historical events have often acted as a catalyst to long-term transformations in housing policy, design, and expectations. The COVID-19 pandemic and its lived experience at home is such an event, which has profoundly challenged existing notions of domesticity and dwelling functionality or usability. World War II and post-war public housing programmes or the fall of communism and the rise of housing marketisation are other historical examples.

This issue invites papers that can advance a new socio-technical discourse through a study of technical housing standards and the lived experience or changes in socio-cultural norms that challenge them.

Cities in the Global North and South are marked by rapid socio-spatial transformation stemming from socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural transitions. The result is often socio-spatial fragmentation, frequently produced by the processes of urban planning and governance. In this thematic issue, contributions are concerned with the nature of planned urban borderlands as spaces of spatio-temporal in-betweenness signifying difference and inequality.

We understand difference across and inclusive of its multiple and intersecting domains, among them species, class, caste, race, gender, age, socio-economic status, ethnicity, or religion. Similarly, we embrace definitions of inequality along the lines of, for instance, spatial, social, economic, educational, or infrastructural. We are particularly interested in the spaces of spatio-temporal in-betweenness (urban borderlands; Iossifova, 2015) that the convergence of difference and inequality produces. These are the physical spaces in-between differently characterized fragments of the city that may exist only for a short time as the city ‘develops’ and transforms, or the physical spaces in-between such fragments that remain permanently to remind us of the differences that produced them.

We are interested in the production of such borderlands, and particularly in the role that architectural, planning, or governance practices play in the (re)production of these spaces across time and space. We also invite contributions that discuss—even suggest—alternatives to the usually crippling effect of such spaces on human health and wellbeing as well as socio-ecological sustainability. We invite contributions from across the spectrum of disciplinary fields and/or professional practice.

Accordingly, this issue of Urban Planning challenges the common perception of neoliberalism as a post-Fordist Keynesian phenomenon. It asks to frame the concept of post-socialist neoliberalism, focusing on the transition from a state-led (or party-led) economy to a market-led one while examining how this influenced the formation of regions, cities, and buildings. We invite scholars interested in developing the framework of post-socialist neoliberalism through place-based analyses of market-oriented urban development and architecture in various global contexts. Authors are encouraged to present research that challenges the conventional understanding of neoliberalism, illustrating the unique circumstances of post-socialism and the manner in which it influences not only urban spaces, but also transnational landscapes, individual buildings, and dwelling units.

References:

Curtis, A. (2021). Can’t get you out of my head [BBC mini-series]. BBC. https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism . Oxford University Press.

Peck, J., Theodore, N., & Brenner, N. (2013). Neoliberal urbanism redux? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , 37 (3), 1091-1099.

Rolnik, R. (2019). Urban warfare: Housing under the empire of finance . Verso.

In recent years, social scientists have paid increasing attention to the diversity of newcomers´ arrival processes, observing an increasing heterogeneity of people who migrate, with different aspirations, temporal perspectives, and political responses. Spatial settings where arrival takes place vary from diverse urban spaces with longstanding experiences of arrival, to more suburban or rural spaces which are often less equipped with arrival-related infrastructures, to (often peripheral) camps (Bovo, 2020). Arrival infrastructuring can be understood as a mediating process which connects individuals (and their social, economic, and cultural capital) with places and societal contexts of arrival. Arrival is shaped by a variety of policies, actors, and places that enhance, channel, or hinder how people gain a foothold in the city (Meeus et al. 2019).

Current research on arrival infrastructures focusses on both structural conditions of arrival as well as newcomers’ agency in shaping arrival processes, illustrating the close interconnectedness of formal, non-formal, and informal arrival infrastructures (Fawaz, 2017). The lens of in/formality is a fruitful perspective to grasp arrival infrastructures and the dynamic interplay and blurry lines between different actors, including state, market, and citizens. Moving beyond the formal–informal dichotomy, this thematic issue seeks to explore the practices, negotiations, and interconnections between different (migrant and non-migrant) actors involved in arrival infrastructuring.

We invite articles that explore the diversity of in/formal practices related to arrival and the ongoing negotiations between more or less institutionally embedded actors. We specifically encourage contributions exploring the various and fluid roles individuals involved in arrival processes play. Articles can, for example, address some of the following questions:

-              Migrant agency in the context of arrival: What role do migrants themselves play in the (co-) production of arrival infrastructures and in shaping how different in/formal structures play out and gain relevance?

-              Between solidarity and exploitation: Which forms of support evolve in the light of commercialisation, privatization, and drawbacks of welfare states?

-              Street-level bureaucracy: How do institutionally embedded actors and their daily routines and practices shape newcomers´ arrival?

-              Transformative engagement: How can urban planners, NGOs, and state representatives deal with urban in/formalities and facilitate arrival?

We welcome theoretical and empirical articles applying methodological approaches such as ethnographic research, mapping, and mixed methods. We invite contributions from across the spectrum of disciplinary fields and/or professional practice. Submissions covering case studies in both the Global North and South may focus on a specific city/country or be comparative in nature.

Bovo, M. (2020). How the presence of newly arrived migrants challenges urban spaces: Three perspectives from recent literature. Urban Planning , 5 (3), 23–32.

Fawaz, M. (2017). Planning and the refugee crisis: Informality as a framework of analysis and reflection. Planning Theory , 16 (1), 99–115.

Meeus, B., Arnaut, K., & Van Heur, B. (Eds.). (2019). Arrival infrastructures: Migration and urban social mobilities . Palgrave Macmillan.

Urban shrinkage has affected an increasing amount of cities and towns in the past decades and has attracted increasing interest of urban studies scholars as well as urban policy-makers. Urban shrinkage can have several causes, but most often is rooted in structural economic crisis, resulting in population decline, vacant and decaying buildings, and underused infrastructure. While some cities manage to return to a growth path after shrinkage, most may have to prepare for further shrinkage or stabilisation instead. Generally, the urban shrinkage discourse advocates a departure from the dominant growth paradigm, and policy advice focuses on adapting to shrinkage rather than a forced attempt to return to growth (e.g., Hospers, 2014; Mallach et al., 2017; Wiechmann & Bontje, 2015). However, this is easier said than done: both academics and policy-makers still struggle with how to revitalise shrinking cities sustainably in the absence of growth (Liu, 2020). Yet, given the current trends of urbanization and demographic change, this issue has global relevance (Jarzebski et al., 2021).

In the early 21st century, the “limits to growth” debate of the 1970s revived under the radical header of “degrowth.” The degrowth movement aims for fundamental changes in economic and political systems and societies to reduce resource and energy use and achieve a sustainable society. Degrowth offers a critical perspective on the exploitative and destructive nature of the global capitalist system. Instead, societies should prioritise social and ecological well-being (D’Alisa et al., 2014; Kallis et al., 2018). So far, the main protagonists in the degrowth debate are academics and environmental activists, but degrowth has yet to become a prominent discourse in urban planning. According to Lehtinen (2018, p. 44), growth is still the primary objective in urban planning, though in a highly selective form: favouring concentrations of population and consumption. Several recent publications call for developing a degrowth research and policy agenda in urban planning (e.g., Brokow-Loga & Eckardt, 2020; Ferreira & Von Schönfeld, 2020; Savini, 2021; Xue, 2021). However, concrete examples of degrowth-based urban planning strategies, let alone their practical implementation, are still lacking.

Urban shrinkage and degrowth thinking seem to have much to offer to each other. Could degrowth be an inspiring and guiding new urban planning paradigm for the sustainable development of shrinking cities? Could shrinking cities be relevant testing grounds to make degrowth’s idealistic principles work in planning practice? This thematic issue aims to bring together novel empirical contributions taking stock of first attempts to connect degrowth to urban shrinkage, exploring in how far this potential unfolds in practice and what obstacles these attempts face. Contributions are asked to address at least one of the following questions:

 - When, why, and how do cities and local planning departments implement post-growth approaches? In how far do these approaches reflect degrowth principles? And can the results be considered sustainable?

- When, why, and how do degrowth ambitions get embedded in broader strategic frameworks for urban planning?

- What obstacles do urban planners and policymakers encounter when trying to mobilize degrowth approaches (Lamker, 2021; Lamker & Schulze Dieckhoff, in press)?

- How would a degrowth strategy for a shrinking city look like? And how useful are recent urban degrowth-based planning proposals for shrinking cities?

- Are there examples of degrowth-like practices or implemented degrowth-like proposals in shrinking cities, and what can we learn from them about the potential of degrowth principles?

Brokow-Loga, A., & Eckardt, F. (2020). Postwachstumsstadt. Konturen einer solidarischen Stadtpolitik . Oekom.

D’Alisa, G., Demaria, F., & Kallis, G. (Eds.). (2014). Degrowth: A vocabulary for a new era. Routledge.

Ferreira, A., & von Schönfeld, K. (2020). Interlacing planning and degrowth scholarship. A manifesto for an interdisciplinary alliance. disP: The Planning Review , 56 (1), 53-64.

Hospers, G. J. (2014). Policy responses to urban shrinkage: From growth thinking to civic engagement. European Planning Studies , 22 (7), 1507-1523.

Jarzebski, M. P., Elmqvist, T., Gasparatos, A., Fukushi, K., Eckersten, S., Haase, D., Goodness, J., Khoshkar, S., Saito, O., Takeuchi, K., Theorelll, T., Dong, N., Kasuga, F., Watanabe, R., Sioen, G. B., Yokohari, M., & Pu, J. (2021). Ageing and population shrinking: Implications for sustainability in the urban century. npj Urban Sustainability , 1 (1), Article 17.

Kallis, G., Kostakis, V., Lange, S., Muraca, B., Paulson, S., & Schmelzer, M. (2018). Research on degrowth. Annual Reviews of Environment and Resources , 43 , 291-316.

Lamker, C. W. (2021). Becoming a post-growth planner . Rooilijn. https://www.rooilijn.nl/artikelen/becoming-a-post-growth-planner

Lamker, C. W., & Schulze Dieckhoff, V. (in press). Becoming a post-growth planner: Inner obstacles to changing roles. In F. Savini, A. Ferreira, & K. C. von Schönfeld (Eds.), Post-growth planning: Cities beyond the market economy . Routledge.

Lehtinen, A. A. (2018). Degrowth in city planning. Fennia , 196 (1), 43-57.

Liu, R. (2020). Strategies for sustainability in shrinking cities: Frames, rationales and goals for a development path change. Nordia Geographical Publications , 49 (5), 49-74.

Mallach, A., Haase, A., & Hattori, K. (2017). The shrinking city in comparative perspective: Contrasting dynamics and responses to urban shrinkage. Cities , 69 , 102-118.

Savini, F. (2021). Towards and urban degrowth: Habitability, finity and polycentric autonomism. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space , 53 (5), Article 0308518X20981391.

Wiechmann, T., & Bontje, M. (2015). Responding to tough times: Policies and planning strategies in shrinking cities. European Planning Studies , 23 (1), 1-11.

Xue, J. (2021). Urban planning and degrowth: A missing dialogue. Local Environment . https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2020.1867840

Cities act as the territorial interfaces between social and planetary transformations. They are the centre for discussing, planning, and implementing climate (mitigation/adaptation) and energy (PV, hydrogen, etc.) transitions.

In this thematic issue, we aim to shed light on how these processes of transformation are dealt in so-called “ordinary” cities. The term “ordinary” cities has been suggested by urban theorist Jennifer Robinson (2005) to highlight the importance of studying urbanization processes in out-of-the centre, small- and medium-sized cities (e.g., in the Arctic and the Global South) that may have different conditions and capacities in dealing with the ensuing urban transitions.

Today, these ordinary towns are facing the massive challenge to transition to carbon-free/climate adaptive/positive energy cities in 30 or less years and meet the international obligations their respective countries have signed up to (e.g., Agenda 2030 and the Paris Agreement). Also, it is in ordinary towns where most of the world population lives and where the biggest impact of the abovementioned transitions will be accrued from.

As such, we aim to push for “ordinary” approaches to urban planning vis-à-vis climate, energy, and social challenges for harnessing diverse strategies to deal with socio-urban transformations. We welcome theoretically-informed, empirical, and comparative contributions of diverse methodological or ontological foundations on any of the following themes and questions:

- Which (new) capacities, relationships, and resources are present in “ordinary” cities in regard to climate and energy transitions?

- How do new forms of (collaborative) governance, such as co-design and living labs, play out in “ordinary cities”?

- How do “ordinary” cities translate (inter)national obligations and treaties to their urban governance?

- How does access to climate-proof infrastructures and positive energy cities play out along different dimensions, such as gender, ethnicity, and class, in “ordinary” cities?

- How can new inter- and trans-disciplinary methods help to better understand the challenges and opportunities as well as planning and managing the climate and energy transitions in “ordinary cities”?

What does it mean for city planners and designers to shape places through and with time? The 2020 pandemic restrictions helped re-introduce Carlos Moreno’s 15-minute-city concept of a chrono-urbanism; however, notions of temporal planning have deeper roots. Christopher Alexander’s 2003 Nature of Order series highlighted the importance of time and geometry for unfolding appropriate built form complexity. Kevin Lynch’s 1961 classic Image of the City and What Time Is This Place? (1972) highlighted planning as a temporal art, distinct from other temporal arts such as music, and his broad characterisation of city types in Theory of Good City Form (1981) identified three epochs of city form—the Cosmic city, the Organic city, and the Mechanical city—as representing successively dominant, spatiotemporal paradigms from the cosmological and societal to the scientific.

Time is implicated in planning’s capacity to address societal needs and challenges. Further, the socio-spatial structures and practices in Global South cities, for example, have distinctive, temporal narratives, which remain underexplored in mainstream planning discourses of alternative city imaginaries. So, this is an appropriate juncture to reflect upon seemingly neutral technical assumptions underlying varied approaches to urbanism. Which temporalities have societies producing distinctive city forms espoused? How might currently dominant, linear-temporal modes be influencing mainstream land-use/spatial planning and design practices? What implications do contemporary digital modes have for education, praxis, resilient 15-minute-cities, or ‘smart’ future-city visions?

This thematic issue is concerned with concepts, practices, and implications of time and the role of spatiotemporal perceptions and knowledges in cities, and/or their planning and design—highlighting these as implicit tools or frameworks, underlying identities, and forms of urbanism, from antiquity to the medieval, modernist, and contemporary eras—across a variety of localities and scales. It explores what, if any, cultural implications such analyses might have, e.g., decentring and potentially decolonising indigenous knowledges and enabling diverse temporalities to be identified and deployed in urban planning and design.

Consequently, this issue asks what lessons and possibilities a greater awareness and more explicit treatment of the temporal dimension might offer cities, planners, and designers, in addressing complex contemporary challenges from climate change and public health to place-shaping, spatial justice, and digital/virtual urbanisms.

We invite papers addressing a range of temporal perspectives including, but not limited to the following:

  • To what extent have societies associated with specific city forms addressed time as either cyclical, linear, or structured in other ways? How were indigenous ontologies or knowledge bases embedded in genius-loci/senses of place? And what lessons may these suggest for re-integrating cultural values into urban planning?
  • How are modern modes of tracking, recording, and mediating time—embedded in current approaches to pedagogy and praxis, underlying current or emerging challenges in either; policymaking, zoning, or urban ‘regeneration/renewal’ practices—driving innovations in socio-environmental mapping or monitoring tools?
  • Which benefits and/or problems have contemporary digital/virtual modes and temporal representations conferred upon everyday practices or upon elements of stakeholder praxis, such as visioning, and community consultation, including capacities to go beyond participation into co-production of outcomes?
  • What might be the contribution of a temporal perspective in avoiding the slow and out-of-sight violence created by toxic geographies/non-economic urban loss?
  • Are current 15-20-minute ‘chrono-urbanism’ perspectives likely to deliver resilience for public health and other emergencies, or do they risk valorising the dominant linear temporal mode and its inherent limitations?
  • How could the inclusion of diverse temporalities, forgotten and hidden spatiotemporal narratives from the Global South aid the development of alternative theories, tools, practices, and forms?
  • What are the implications or risks of prevailing temporal visions for ‘smart’/future-cities, and potentials for alternative temporalities to better ensure achievement of citizen-led, rather than technology-led, outcomes?

The United Nations' 2030 Agenda, with its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), plays a key role in urban sustainability. Cities around the world are using the SDGs as a framework to implement a more sustainable form of urban development. However, SDGs have been criticised for their lack of transformative potential, the difficulty of measuring implementation, as well as their reliance on voluntary action and their alignment with economic growth. Based on existing experiences in cities, this thematic issue takes a critical stance on local implementations of the SDGs and seeks contributions on lessons learned, existing problems, as well as indications for the future design of global sustainability agendas from a city perspective. In this way, the thematic issue aims to contribute to the ongoing debates on the post-2030 agenda. Contributions to the thematic issue may address questions such as the usefulness of global policy agendas for promoting local sustainability in general, the limitations of sustainability indicators and monitoring systems, accountability in urban development and planning, and whether innovations such as new forms of governance can support the 2030 Agenda and its successor. For this thematic issue, we are looking for contributions from different geographical backgrounds and theoretical approaches, as well as case studies and comparative work.

Climate change and its far-reaching consequences have emerged as a paramount concern demanding our attention for the development of robust and resilient infrastructures (IPCC, 2014). Across the globe, urban centres grapple with escalating temperatures, surging sea levels, flooding and urban inundations, and severe weather extremes—all unequivocally attributed to climate change (C40 Cities, 2020; Montanya & Valera, 2016). Consequently, the very sustainability, resilience, longevity, functionality, and efficiency of urban infrastructures are jeopardized (Artur & Hilhorst, 2012; OECD, 2018).

Urban regions are progressively bearing the brunt of climate change, manifesting perilous consequences for the functionality and durability of existing infrastructure systems. Thus, a compelling argument emerges: the imperative to craft sustainable, resilient infrastructure employing innovative methods facilitated by smart technologies, fortifying urban environments to confront and adapt to the exigencies imposed by climate change (OECD, 2018).

Resilient infrastructure entails a dedicated focus on endowing infrastructure systems with the capability to withstand and rebound from the stresses and shocks ensuing from assorted challenges, all while remaining sustainable and functional (Holling, 1973, 1986). Smart technologies, including information communication technology, Internet of Things, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, represent potent tools to forge and create intelligent, sustainable, and resilient infrastructure. These technologies can simultaneously serve to monitor, control, manage, and optimize the performance of urban infrastructure. This symbiosis proffers frameworks and methodologies for the planning, development, construction, and management of urban infrastructure in the wake of climate change, thereby safeguarding the long-term existence and viability of urban habitats.

The thematic issue extends an invitation to explore the multifaceted dimensions of smart, sustainable, and resilient infrastructure. It beckons an examination of the dynamic interplay between urban planning, infrastructure development, smart technology, and climate change with the overarching goal of fostering the sustainability and resilience of infrastructure. In this context, the issue welcomes contributions in the form of original research, reviews, and case studies, encompassing various facets of the theme, including but not limited to:

  • Climate change-responsive urban infrastructure planning and design.
  • Integration of smart technology in the development, construction, management, and optimization of urban infrastructure functions, augmenting resilience.
  • Resilience in urban mobility, water, energy systems, and communication in the face of climate-induced disruptions.
  • Retrofitting of existing, vulnerable, and unsustainable infrastructure.
  • Utilization of smart/advanced materials, including nanomaterials, for the construction and development of diverse urban infrastructures.
  • Frameworks for policy, governance, and adaptation, including citizen participation and responsiveness, to meet the challenges posed by climate change.
  • Showcase of case studies and best practices illustrating successes in smart and resilient urban infrastructure planning and development projects aimed at countering the challenges of climate change.
  • Advanced and innovative methodological approaches.

Artur, L., & Hilhorst, D. (2012). Everyday realities of climate change adaptation in Mozambique. Global Environmental Change , 22 (2), 529–536.

C40 Cities. (2020). The future we don't want: How climate change could impact the world's greatest cities .

Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics , 4 , 1–23.

Holling, C. S. (1996). Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience. In P. Schulze (Ed.), Engineering within ecological constraints (pp. 31–44). National Academy of Engineering.

IPCC. (2014). Climate change 2014: Impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability .

Montanya, C. N., & Valera, P. (2016). Climate change and its impact on the incarcerated population: A descriptive review. Social Work in Public Health , 31 , 348–357.

OECD. (2018). Climate-resilient infrastructure: Policy perspectives (OECD Environment Policy Paper No. 14).

Food environments are the collective physical, economic, digital, policy, and socio-cultural conditions that influence food and beverage choices. They are directly linked to diets and health outcomes such as overweight, obesity, and noncommunicable diseases.

Food environments are complex and, in recent years, economic, welfare, and technological developments have increased this complexity. The Covid-19 pandemic led to record levels of food waste in wealthier countries, due to retail closures, supply chain shocks, stockpiling, and the logistical challenges of redistributing food. The economic aftermath of the pandemic has contributed to a cost-of-living crisis which has further accelerated the growth of the charity food sector, and food banks in particular, as they become an evermore established feature of food and welfare landscapes. Greater levels of inequality and falls in income have had a negative impact on diet, with households left reliant on cheap, filling, processed foods. Against this backdrop of crises and inequality, the digitalization of food environments is becoming a central issue in public health, yet little is known about this emerging field. A variety of landscape metaphors including food deserts, food swamps, and food brownfields have been deployed to provide a critical lens for moving beyond a sole focus on retail outlets and towards pathologizing food environment failures.

All these factors motivate us to draw upon collective expertise in these fields for a thematic issue and provide an overview of current debates and evidence.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

•             Digital food environments

•             Food insecurity and charitable food aid

•             Conceptualizing and measuring food environments

•             The impact of Covid-19 on food environments

•             Disruptions to food systems and environments

Representative of the growing awareness of pressing social, political, planning, and environmental issues in the food context, such as sustainable and fair food system design, is the thematic boom around the research field of food geographies. They open a critical view on current food production, preparation, and consumption relations in urban contexts from a geographical perspective and integrate also decolonial, feminist, and intersectional approaches. The shift of food policy to the urban level forms one of many solutions to current debates on the negative impacts and social injustices of food production, consumption, and waste.

By signing the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact in 2015, hundreds of cities recognized the importance of food as a significant urban system and its necessary socio-ecological transition(s) for achieving urban sustainability goals. In this context, public catering (food provided in public municipal entities) can be seen as ‘leverage point’ for transitions toward sustainable food systems. Similarly, civil society initiatives, such as food policy councils, demand for democratic participation in the decision-making processes on local food systems. Also, they call for ‘food justice’ in the sense of overcoming postcolonial power relations in urban foodscapes that led to exclusions from access to fresh, healthy food for disadvantaged social groups due to interlinked factors, such as class, gender, race, and age.

The aim of this thematic issue is to discuss the importance of food geographies for the research of social-ecological transition processes of the food system for a sustainable city. Hereby, the field of food geographies with its methodological approaches at the interface of different disciplines is to be critically assessed and new interdisciplinary perspectives are to be opened up.

As a tool serving other disciplines of enquiry, artificial intelligence (AI) comes of age in the first decades of the 21st century. AI offers the potential of a potent discovery, design, and analysis paradigm for questions in urban planning. For instance, AI algorithms generate large-scale city models from point clouds, and machine learning predict scenarios for resilient urban environments. This thematic issue raises a forum for cross-disciplinary discourse at the intersection of urban planning and AI. It will discuss emerging use cases in the urban planning practice, and the relevant AI techniques being used and developed, and articulate challenges and opportunities for urban planning in the age of AI.

This thematic issue looks specifically at two aspects of this intersection: AI for urban planning, where existing AI techniques are applied to questions of interest for UP scholars; and AI in urban planning, where (UP and other) scholars raise new challenges for AI or develop new methods in AI. Topics of interest include, without being limited to, AI for and in:

  • Land-use planning
  • Environmental planning
  • Smart and sustainable mobility
  • Energy efficiency; community engagement
  • Safety, security, and resilience
  • Multi-actor systems and multi-stakeholder deliberation
  • Explainable AI
  • Data, knowledge, and workflows
  • Ethical, justice, and legal issues

Contributions to the thematic issue are welcomed from researchers and practitioners who identify with communities such as urban planning, built environment or environmental geography, or AI communities (e.g., machine learning, knowledge representation, natural language technologies, multi-agent systems), or situate themselves with a multi-disciplinary lens.

For well over a decade, everyday urban life has been shaped by neoliberal austerity policies that affect everyday caring practices in both private and institutional contexts (Gabauer et al., 2022; Lawson, 2007; Theodore, 2020). However, practices of care are not only part of individual survival; they are also key elements of urbanity and of lived social day-to-day experiences in public spaces. Particularly in times of multiple societal crises, individual and communal quality of life are under severe stress. Therefore, caring communities and the resulting urban cultures of care are becoming an increasingly important element of social justice and cohesion in diversified urban societies.

Caring communities respond to unequal access to resources on the basis of intersectional powergeometries by caring for one another in a self-organized manner. As a result, new and more resilient social relationships might develop, which also collectively empower and enable socio-political democratization. However, caring communities do not simply take place in various spaces; they also produce public spaces of mutual care, which then become part of the city's social infrastructure (Latham & Layton, 2019; Middleton & Samanani, 2021; Simone, 2004). Therefore, a growing number of caring communities results in formal and informal cultures of care (Greenhough et al., 2022), which have the potential to create urban cultures of care with high social and spatial visibility and thus opportunities for social interaction.

In this thematic issue, we aim to develop further the concept of “caring communities” and to establish “urban cultures of care” by connecting different strands of already existing discourses. We invite articles from various fields related to urban studies that contribute novel conceptual ideas, insightful case studies, and critical perspectives. We particularly encourage young researchers and authors with a practice-based perspective on urban cultures of care to join this issue.

Reference list:

Gabauer, A., Knierbein, S., Cohen, N., Lebuhn, H., Trogal, K., Viderman, T., & Haas, T. (Eds.). (2022). Care and the city . Routledge.

Greenhough, B., Davis, G., & Bowlby, S. (2022). Why ‘cultures of care’? Social & Cultural Geography , 24 (1), 1–10.

Latham, A., & Layton, J. (2019). Social infrastructure and the public life of cities: Studying urban sociality and public spaces. Geography Compass , 13 (7), Article e12444.

Lawson, V. (2007). Geographies of care and responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers , 97 (1), 1–11.

Middleton, J., & Samanani, F. (2021). Accounting for care within human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , 46 (1), 29–43.

Simone, A. (2004). People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture , 16 (3), 407–429.

Theodore, N. (2020). Governing through austerity: (Il)logics of neoliberal urbanism after the global financial crisis. Journal of Urban Affairs , 42 (1), 1–17.

In recent times, people and communities around the world have faced numerous global crises, leading to increased expectations for urgent action from governments, industries, and civil society. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 global objectives, were designed to address key challenges, such as poverty eradication, sustainable cities and communities, and reduced inequalities, to create a better and more sustainable future for all. Aligned with the UN SDGs, this call for contributions to a thematic issue of the Urban Planning journal seeks to advance participatory planning approaches and methods exploring connections between planning and the climate emergency. Its key goal is to demonstrate the diversity of responses and contributions from participatory planning and design in addressing the UN SDGs.

Concurrently, the adoption of smart city technologies by businesses and city administrations aims to optimise resources and enhance public governance. However, these predominantly techno-centric and top-down approaches often overlook crucial social, civic, and environmental factors, prioritising urban contexts while neglecting rural areas. To achieve the SDGs, it is crucial to shift the focus from solely “smart” technologies to participatory planning involving meaningful community engagement and collaboration with stakeholders from the early design stages to project completion. By leveraging information and communication technology, participatory planning and design can foster a sense of shared ownership, social responsibility, and investment in sustainable development for cities, regions, and rural communities.

By embracing participatory planning and design, we can collectively strive for inclusive and sustainable urban development, promoting social equity, economic prosperity, and environmental stewardship. However, participatory planning practice comes with challenges, and this thematic issue hopes to curate a diverse collection of articles that report on both challenges and opportunities.

The impact of climate change is one of the key challenges cities are confronting around the world (Chantillon et al., 2021). Consequently, cities have been taking the lead in developing adaptation and resilience strategies (Mehryar et al., 2022). However, such adaptation requires innovative approaches and an understanding of the governance context where they take place (Casiano Flores et al., 2020, 2021). Within these circumstances, co-creation practices have gained significant attention as effective governance strategies for harnessing local expertise and insights to develop innovative solutions (Torfing et al., 2019). Co-creation refers to the collaborative process between public and private actors in solving a shared public problem or task. This involves exchanging various resources to co-initiate, co-design, and/or co-implement visions, strategies, policies, regulatory frameworks, or technological solutions (Hofstad et al., 2022).

This thematic issue aims to explore the intersection of co-creation practices and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, virtual reality/augmented reality, and the Internet of Things, in addressing climate change adaptation in urban planning and management. Despite the growing interest in co-creation research, its integration with emerging technologies remains underdeveloped (Rodriguez Müller et al., 2021; Tan & Rodriguez Müller, 2023), limiting our understanding of its challenges and benefits for climate change adaptation in cities. This thematic issue seeks to fill this gap by shedding light on the interplay between emerging technologies and co-creation processes and providing insights into effective approaches, good practices, and cautionary experiences that can facilitate effective climate change responses in cities.

To contribute to this thematic issue, we invite empirical studies that focus on co-creation with emerging technologies to develop and implement strategies, policies, services, and infrastructure aimed at addressing climate challenges in cities. Potential research topics for this thematic issue include, but are not limited to, the following questions:

  • How can emerging technologies support co-creation to achieve climate neutrality of (smart) cities by 2050?
  • What are the challenges that co-creation with digital technologies for climate change adaptation can face and how can they be overcome?
  • What are the ethical considerations and implications of co-creation processes with emerging technologies in urban climate governance?
  • How can emerging technologies enhance the monitoring, evaluation, and feedback mechanisms of co-creation initiatives for climate change adaptation in cities?
  • What are the potential synergies and trade-offs between digital co-creation and existing governance structures for climate change adaptation in cities?
  • What are the barriers and enablers for successful implementation of co-creation initiatives with emerging technologies in urban climate change adaptation?
  • To what extent do co-creation processes with emerging technologies lead to the adoption and implementation of sustainable policies and practices for climate change adaptation in cities?
  • How can hybrid co-creation approaches, combining online and offline tools and methodologies, effectively leverage emerging technologies to address climate challenges in cities?

Casiano Flores, C., Tan, E., Buntinx, I., Crompvoets, J., Stöcker, C., & Zevenbergen, J. (2020). Governance assessment of the UAVs implementation in Rwanda under the fit-for-purpose land administration approach. Land Use Policy , 99 , Article 104725. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104725

Casiano Flores, C., Tan, E., & Crompvoets, J. (2021). Governance assessment of UAV implementation in Kenyan land administration system. Technology in Society , 66 , Article 101664. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2021.101664

Chantillon, M., Casiano Flores, C., Crompvoets, J., Sallano, M., Eiras Antunes, M., Garcia Barron, M., Barroca, J., Vicente, P., Vaz Raposo, A., & Sidique, G. (2021). Proposal for a European Interoperability Framework for Smart Cities and Communities (EIF4SCC) . Publications Office of the European Union. https://doi.org/10.2799/816559

Hofstad, H., Sørensen, E., Torfing, J., & Vedeld, T. (2022). Designing and leading collaborative urban climate governance: Comparative experiences of co‐creation from Copenhagen and Oslo. Environmental Policy and Governance , 32 (3), 203–216. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1984

Mehryar, S., Sasson, I., & Surminski, S. (2022). Supporting urban adaptation to climate change: What role can resilience measurement tools play? Urban Climate , 41 , Article 101047. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2021.101047

Rodriguez Müller, A. P., Casiano Flores, C., Albrecht, V., Steen, T., & Crompvoets, J. (2021). A scoping review of empirical evidence on (digital) public services co-creation. Administrative Sciences , 11 (4), Article 130. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci11040130

Tan, E., & Rodriguez Müller, A. P. (2023). Paths to citizens-controlled coproduction: The use of blockchain technology in digital coproduction. Public Management Review . Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2023.2218388

Torfing, J., Sørensen, E., & Røiseland, A. (2019). Transforming the public sector into an arena for co-creation: Barriers, drivers, benefits, and ways forward. Administration & Society , 51 (5), 795–825. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399716680057

Walkability has emerged as a key focus of multi-disciplinary research, linked to the aims of reversing car-dependence and re-enabling walking as a healthy, environmentally sustainable and sociable mode of mobility. While often conflated with actual walking, etymologically walkability refers to the capacity for walking enabled by the built environment. It has been linked to the key neighbourhood-scale morphological properties of access, density, and mix, as well as micro-scalar elements of the street section, such as public/private interfaces, footpaths, and landscaping. Yet none of these attributes can be reduced to a simple measure, nor are these separable from the natural conditions of topography or climate. The multiplicity of interrelations between these various factors is what defines the overall urban design quality.

This thematic issue will present a collection of articles engaging with the conundrum posed by the imperative for urban codes leading to the formation of walkable environments, and the intrinsic limitations of reducing such a complex spatio-temporal concept to a single index or metric. How can walkability be operationalised in a non-reductionist way? What research methods can capture spatial properties linked to walkability? Which urban codes can be effective in enhancing walkability and what are their limitations? How do walkable environments emerge informally? What are the unintended outcomes of formal codes for walkability? The issue will include articles contributing to urban theory, research methods, and planning practice, advancing understandings of walkability.

Current guidelines of urban development (e.g., EU Urban Agenda, The New Leipzig Charter) in western economies (e.g., the US, EU, Australia) have shifted their focus from functionally separated areas within cities towards integrated, sustainable, and mixed-used urban areas. One significant component of these efforts in the economic realm is the resurgence of “the productive city,” where urban production/manufacturing within local economies at the district level (e.g., neighborhood, quarter) have returned to these spatial settings and accordingly gained importance in planning, as is reflected, for example, in the guiding principle of the city of short distances or the compact city. These trends have recently been accelerated by the pandemic, the polarization of global trade, and the associated vulnerability of global production networks.

Various economic activities (urban agriculture, industries, services) are conceivable in the “productive city.” However, this thematic issue attempts to highlight urban production/manufacturing as tangible manifestations embedded in their local settings because they are conflict-ridden, emanate distinctive spatial characteristics, and require complex planning processes. Therefore, we call for empirical case studies of such local embedded economies with urban production/manufacturing activities that are predominantly situated at the district level. These activities can relate to high-tech (e.g., Industry 4.0) but also to low-tech and high-touch industries (e.g., crafts, furniture). Our principal interest rests on programs, projects, networks, or initiatives of communal, family, and/or small and medium urban production/manufacturing (collectives); moreover, studies that deal with novel municipal and/or non-state governance, planning, and promotion measures are welcome. All initiatives could emphasize—but are not limited to—constellations of resident actors relying on mix of uses, a neighborhood character, curation, low-emission and sustainability, specific settings and utilization of the built environment, or local value chains.

Suggested literature:

Blakely, E. J., & Leigh, N. G. (2013). Planning local economic development . SAGE.

BMI. (2020). The New Leipzig charter . https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/downloads/EN/eu-presidency/gemeinsame-erklaerungen/new-leipzig-charta-2020.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=8

Ferm, J., Panayotopoulos-Tsiros, D., & Griffiths, S. (2021). Planning urban manufacturing, industrial building typologies, and built environments: Lessons from inner London. Urban Planning , 6 (3), 350–367.

Gärtner, S., & Meyer, K. (2023). Die Produktive Stadt. (Re-) Integration der Urbanen Produktion [The productive city. (Re-) Integration of urban production]. Springer.

Grodach, C., & Gibson, C. (2019). Advancing manufacturing?: Blinkered visions in US and Australian urban policy. Urban Policy and Research , 37 (3), 279–293.

Harrison, J. (2014). The rise of the non-state ‘place-based’ economic development strategy. Local Economy , 29 (4/5), 453–468.

Henn, S., Behling, M., & Schäfer, S. (Eds.). (2020). Lokale Ökonomie-Konzepte, Quartierskontexte und Interventionen [Local economy concepts, neighbourhood contexts and interventions]. Springer.

Lane, R. N., & Rappaport, N. (Eds.). (2020). The design of urban manufacturing . Routledge.

Mistry, N., & Byron, J. (2011). The federal role in supporting urban manufacturing . Brookings Institution.

Pike, A., Marlow, D., McCarthy, A., O’Brien, P., & Tomaney, J. (2015). Local institutions and local economic development: The Local Enterprise Partnerships in England, 2010–. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society , 8 (2), 185–204.

Planning has always been an ambivalent practice. On the one hand, for the ruling powers planning can be a tool to exercise control and establish hierarchies of power. On the other hand, it can be a tool to distribute resources and lay ground for welfare structures. However, the benefits of planning have never included everyone and there is always a need for a critical eye on planning as a governing practice. This critical eye is today urgent as attacks on democratic institutions are now spreading so fast that, according to Freedom House (2021), there is reason to talk about an “antidemocratic turn” in history. Over a few decades, in Europe and elsewhere, there has been an increasing support of far-right and ethno-nationalist parties. Many of these draw on ideologies of white supremacy and disregard fundamental principles of democracy, such as respect for all people’s rights regardless of race, gender, religious beliefs, etc. In a recent report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), it is stated that in as much as half of the world’s democracies, democracy is currently in retreat. A similar negative tendency is visible among the world’s non-democracies; half of them are becoming significantly more repressive (International IDEA, 2022).

This thematic issue for Urban Planning focuses on the consequences of anti-democratic tendencies for planning practices in different geographical and political contexts and how they risk reinforcing existing un-equal power structures based on e.g., gender, sexuality, class, race and colonial relations. We especially welcome contributions which critically reflect on the effects of current anti-democratic development, what the implications are for different social groups, and what new roles planning must take on in order for it to contribute to new and democratic futures for all.

Freedom House. (2021). Nations in transit 2021: The antidemocratic turn . https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-04/NIT_2021_final_042321.pdf

International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. (2022). The global state of democracy 2022: Forging social contracts in a time of discontent . https://www.idea.int/democracytracker/sites/default/files/2022-11/the-global-state-of-democracy-2022.pdf

The rise of the dynamic field known as Geogames has been due to the response of the urban planning domain, supported by digital technologies advances and participatory demands, to pressing contemporary urban issues. Nonetheless, since the 1970s, serious games have been applied as a multiple dialogue communication and training platform, as well as a consensus reaching simulation tool over urban (re)development impacts (Abt, 1970; Duke, 1974; Sanoff, 1979; Summers, 1979). Geogames are a fusion of geospatial technologies, serious gaming mechanics, and playful public participation, providing architects and urban planners with powerful tools to engage a range of stakeholders, simulate scenarios, and up-scale decision-making environments (Ahlqvist & Schlieder, 2018; Andrade et al., 2020; Poplin et al., 2017, 2020). This thematic issue seeks to delve into transgressing the boundaries of the urban and reginonal planning discipline, integrating concepts, epistemologies, and methodologies from game studies, urban and cultural geography, cognitive and environmental psychology, and others.

The factors affecting urban and regional planning today may have multifaceted causes in historic, social, economic, political, and environmental (Levy, 2017) realms, including overlooked decision-making factors such as power and interest relations, and conflicts and coalitions related to stakeholders’ attitudes and behaviours (Mayer et al., 2005). This thematic issue aims at assembling cutting-edge research, teaching, and practice insights into the ways geogames are being employed to tackle some of the most pressing issues in urban (re)development including, but not limited to, urban degradation and (re)urbanization; built heritage conservation and sustainability; affordable housing and diverse particular housing needs; public transportation, active mobility, and nature-based solutions for healthy and happy cities; circularity and energy efficiency; and the critical issues of adaptation planning towards climate change impacts.

Original contributions such as theoretical frameworks, empirical studies, and case study analyses are invited, especially the ones navigating the design, development, and implementation of geogames, as well as the impact and effectiveness of geogames facing the challenges of digitalization and complex decision environments. Topics should include the integration of geospatial data in gaming environments, such as participatory urban design simulations; multi-stakeholder values and role-playing engagement; virtual, augmented, and mixed reality applications for urban exploration and visualization; ground-breaking artificial intelligence (AI) in games; and the metaverse in smart cities management. Non-digital games applications, such as board, tabletop, and card games, which reflect upon twinning to a digital format, are also welcomed.

Abt, C. C. (1970). Serious games . Viking Press.

Ahlqvist, O., & Schlieder, C. (2018). Introducing geogames and geoplay: Characterizing an emerging research field. In O. Ahlqvist & C. Schlieder (Eds.), Geogames and geoplay: Game-based approaches to the analysis of geo-information (pp. 1–18). Springer.

Andrade, B., Poplin, A., & de Sena, Í. S. (2020). Minecraft as a tool for engaging children in urban planning: A case study in Tirol Town, Brazil. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information , 9 (3), Article 170.

Duke, R. D. (1974). Gaming: The future's language . Sage Publications.

Levy, J. M. (2017). Contemporary urban planning . Taylor & Francis.

Mayer, I. S., van Bueren, E. M., Bots, P. W. G., van der Voort, H., & Seijdel, R. (2005). Collaborative decision-making for sustainable urban renewal projects: A simulation – Gaming approach. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design , 32 (3), 403–423.

Poplin, A., Andrade, B., & de Sena, Í. S. (2020). Geogames for change: Cocreating the future of cities with games. In D. Leorke & M. Owens (Eds.), Games and play in the creative, smart and ecological city (pp. 64–93). Routledge.

Poplin, A., Kerkhove, T., Reasoner, M., Roy, A., & Brown, N. (2017). Serious geogames for civic engagement in urban planning: Discussion based on four game prototypes. In C. Yamu, A. Poplin, O. Devisch, & G. De Roo (Eds.), The virtual and the real in planning and urban design (pp. 189–213). Routledge.

Sanoff, H. (1979). Design games. William Kaufmann.

Summers, L. H. (1979). Operational games in architecture and design. JAE , 33 (1), 2–7.

© Cogitatio Press (Lisbon, Portugal) unless otherwise stated | Privacy Policy | Homepage

research paper on urban planning issues

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

  •  We're Hiring!
  •  Help Center

Urban Planning

  • Most Cited Papers
  • Most Downloaded Papers
  • Newest Papers
  • Save to Library
  • Last »
  • Urban Design Follow Following
  • Urban Studies Follow Following
  • Urban And Regional Planning Follow Following
  • City and Regional Planning Follow Following
  • Urban Regeneration Follow Following
  • Architecture Follow Following
  • Urbanism Follow Following
  • Urban Geography Follow Following
  • Landscape Architecture Follow Following
  • Housing Follow Following

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

  • Academia.edu Publishing
  •   We're Hiring!
  •   Help Center
  • Find new research papers in:
  • Health Sciences
  • Earth Sciences
  • Cognitive Science
  • Mathematics
  • Computer Science
  • Academia ©2024

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • View all journals
  • My Account Login
  • Explore content
  • About the journal
  • Publish with us
  • Sign up for alerts
  • Open access
  • Published: 21 February 2024

Making cities mental health friendly for adolescents and young adults

  • Pamela Y. Collins   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3956-448X 1 ,
  • Moitreyee Sinha 2 ,
  • Tessa Concepcion 3 ,
  • George Patton   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5039-8326 4 ,
  • Thaisa Way 5 ,
  • Layla McCay 6 ,
  • Augustina Mensa-Kwao   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8136-6108 1 ,
  • Helen Herrman 7 , 8 ,
  • Evelyne de Leeuw 9 ,
  • Nalini Anand 10 ,
  • Lukoye Atwoli 11 ,
  • Nicole Bardikoff 12 ,
  • Chantelle Booysen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7218-8039 13 ,
  • Inés Bustamante 14 ,
  • Yajun Chen 15 ,
  • Kelly Davis 16 ,
  • Tarun Dua 17 ,
  • Nathaniel Foote 18 ,
  • Matthew Hughsam 2 ,
  • Damian Juma 19 ,
  • Shisir Khanal 20 ,
  • Manasi Kumar   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9773-8014 21 , 22 ,
  • Bina Lefkowitz 23 , 24 ,
  • Peter McDermott 25 ,
  • Modhurima Moitra 3 ,
  • Yvonne Ochieng   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9741-9814 26 ,
  • Olayinka Omigbodun 27 ,
  • Emily Queen 1 ,
  • Jürgen Unützer 3 ,
  • José Miguel Uribe-Restrepo 28 ,
  • Miranda Wolpert 29 &
  • Lian Zeitz 30  

Nature ( 2024 ) Cite this article

2142 Accesses

106 Altmetric

Metrics details

  • Public health
  • Risk factors

Urban life shapes the mental health of city dwellers, and although cities provide access to health, education and economic gain, urban environments are often detrimental to mental health 1 , 2 . Increasing urbanization over the next three decades will be accompanied by a growing population of children and adolescents living in cities 3 . Shaping the aspects of urban life that influence youth mental health could have an enormous impact on adolescent well-being and adult trajectories 4 . We invited a multidisciplinary, global group of researchers, practitioners, advocates and young people to complete sequential surveys to identify and prioritize the characteristics of a mental health-friendly city for young people. Here we show a set of ranked characteristic statements, grouped by personal, interpersonal, community, organizational, policy and environmental domains of intervention. Life skills for personal development, valuing and accepting young people’s ideas and choices, providing safe public space for social connection, employment and job security, centring youth input in urban planning and design, and addressing adverse social determinants were priorities by domain. We report the adversities that COVID-19 generated and link relevant actions to these data. Our findings highlight the need for intersectoral, multilevel intervention and for inclusive, equitable, participatory design of cities that support youth mental health.

More than a decade ago, Galea posed the question “Can we improve mental health if we improve cities?” 4 . In the past two centuries, urbanization has shaped landscapes and lives, making it the “sentinel demographic shift” of our times 4 . The relationships between mental health status and the social, cultural and physical environment have been explored for at least as long; nineteenth-century researchers proposed environmental exposures as possible explanations of ‘insanity’ 5 . Faris and Dunham’s classic 1930s study 6 linked social disorganization and unstable communities to mental disorders. Two decades later, Leonard Duhl sought to create healthy societies through liveable cities, informing the World Health Organization’s Healthy Cities initiative 7 , 8 . The question remains pertinent today even as we recognize the multiple and complex forces that shape mental health 9 . Today we understand that urban environments influence a broad range of health outcomes for their populations, positively and negatively, and this impact is manifested unequally 10 . Opportunities for education and connection exist for some, whereas rising levels of urban inequality, violence, stressful racial or ethnic dynamics in urban neighbourhoods, exposure to environmental toxins, lack of green space, inadequate infrastructure and fear of displacement increase risk for poor mental health and disproportionately affect marginalized groups 11 . Disparate outcomes also pertain to distinct developmental stages, and the mental health of adolescents and young adults is particularly vulnerable to urban exposures.

Adolescents, youth and urban mental health

Young people under the age of 25 are the demographic group most likely to move to cities for educational and employment opportunities, and by 2050 cities will be home to 70% of the world’s children 3 . Cities concentrate innovation 3 and have long been considered the consummate source of skills, resources and talent 12 . They offer greater opportunities for health and economic development, education, employment, entertainment and social freedoms (that is, the ‘urban advantage’), but rapid urbanization also deepens disparities and exposes individuals to considerable adversity, placing their mental health at risk 13 . In fact, most evidence points to urban living as a risk factor for poorer mental health, yielding increased risk for psychosis, anxiety disorders and depression 1 , 2 . Adolescence and young adulthood, specifically, encompass a critical period of risk for the incidence of mental disorders: an estimated half of mental disorders evident before age 65 begin in adolescence and 75% begin by age 24 (ref.  14 ). Mental disorders are the leading causes of disease burden among 10–24-year-olds worldwide 15 , responsible for an estimated 28.2 million disability-adjusted life years globally, with 1 disability-adjusted life year being equivalent to a healthy year of life lost to the disability caused by mental disorders. Public awareness of these issues rose as the incidence of mental disorders and suicide increased in some countries among adolescents and young adults during the coronavirus pandemic 16 , 17 . Urban environments probably have a role in these processes.

Fundamental to adolescents’ growth and development are their interactions with the complex urban environment: physical, political, economic, social and cultural 18 . Adolescents have a heightened sensitivity to context and social evaluation, and a stronger neural response to social exclusion, as well as to threat and reward stimuli 19 , and it is plausible that they may be particularly sensitive to social and environmental cues in the urban context, such as discrimination or violence. Discriminatory policies and norms are entrenched in many of the institutions with which young people interact (for example, schools, housing, justice and policing), and minoritized youth may experience the emotional and mental health consequences 20 . In fact, in settings of structural inequality (for example, high neighbourhood poverty and unemployment), young people are at greater risk for low self-efficacy and feelings of powerlessness and depression 21 . Social cohesion and collective efficacy can reduce the effects of concentrated disadvantage and nurture social and emotional assets among young people, families and their networks 21 .

At present, the world’s largest population of adolescents and young adults so far is growing up amid the sequelae of a tenacious pandemic, rapid population growth in urban centres and increasing urbanization, demanding an urgent response to support youth mental health 22 . Investing in adolescent well-being is said to yield a triple dividend through actions that reduce mortality and disability in adolescence, prolong healthy life in adulthood, and protect the health of the next generation by educating and strengthening the health of young parents 23 . Interventions in urban settings that align with developmental needs of adolescents and young adults could remediate insults from early life and establish healthy behaviours and trajectories for adult life 19 , 24 , potentially averting chronic conditions such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the associated mental health, social and physical sequelae 25 . In fact, investment in a package of adolescent mental health interventions can yield a 24-fold return in health and economic benefits 26 . At the societal level, shaping the aspects of urban life that influence youth mental health—through services, social policies and intentional design—could have an enormous impact 4 . Proposals for ‘restorative urbanism’ that centre mental health, wellness and quality of life in urban design may move cities in the direction of moulding urban environments for better adolescent health 27 , 28 . Young people, who contribute to the creativity of urban environments and drive movements for social change 29 , have a central part to play in this transformation.

Mental Health Friendly Cities, a global multi-stakeholder initiative led by citiesRISE, mobilizes youth-driven action and systems reform to promote and sustain the mental health and well-being of young people in cities around the world 30 , 31 ( Supplementary Information ). To guide transformative actions that will enable cities to promote and sustain adolescent and youth mental health, we studied global priorities for urban adolescent mental health. One aim of this study is to contribute data-driven insights that can be used to unite several sectors in cities to act within and across their domains in favour of mental health promotion and care that is responsive to the needs of young people. To that end, we administered a series of linked surveys that permitted the influence of ideas from young people and multidisciplinary domain experts through an anonymous sequential process, following established methods for research priority setting 32 .

Framework and top-ranked recommendations

To determine the elements of an urban landscape that would support mental health for adolescents and youth and would amplify their voices, we recruited a panel of 518 individuals from 53 countries to participate in a series of three digitally administered surveys that began in April 2020 (Table 1 ). Figure 1 shows the panel participation at each round. In survey 1, panellists responded to the open-ended question: “What are the characteristics of a mental health-friendly city for young people?”. Analysis of survey 1 data produced 134 statements about mental health-friendly cities for young people ( Methods ). In survey 2, participants selected their preferred 40 of the 134 statements. They were also presented with a second question related to the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on their ideas about youth well-being in cities. In survey 3, we categorized survey 2 statements by socioecological domains (Fig. 2 ) and asked panellists to rank-list their preferred statements in each domain. Before ranking, panellists were required to choose one of three framings that informed their selected ranking: immediacy of impact on youth mental health; ability to help youth thrive in cities; and ease or feasibility of implementation.

figure 1

The composition of the project leadership structures, sample recruitment and participation by each survey round are shown below. We invited 801 individuals to participate in the survey panel through recommendations and direct invitations from advisory board members. Participants recruited through snowball sampling received the Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) link ( n  = 24). Individuals who gave informed consent in REDCap were deemed to have accepted the survey panel invitation. S1, survey 1; S2, survey 2; S3, survey 3.

figure 2

The socioecological model with six levels (personal, interpersonal, community, organization, policy and environment) that are used to categorize the characteristics of a mental health friendly city.

We present the findings of the third survey within a socioecological model (Figs. 3 – 5 ) because of this model’s relevance to the combination of social and environmental exposures in an urban setting and their interaction with the developing adolescent 33 . Bronfenbrenner’s model begins by recognizing that young people’s personal experiences and development are shaped by their interactions with the people around them 34 ; that is, they react to and act on their immediate environment of familial and peer relationships (microlevel). These interpersonal relationships are also influenced by neighbourhood and community dynamics and exposure to institutions and policies (mesolevel). These, in turn, are nested within the organizational, political, historical, cultural (for example, values, norms and beliefs) and physical environments (macrolevel) whose interplay directly or indirectly affects the adolescent’s mental health and well-being. A high court ruling (policy environment) could have direct or indirect effects on the community, household and personal well-being of a young person seeking asylum. The socioecological framework encompasses the dynamic relationships of an individual with the social environment.

figure 3

Mean ranks and standard deviations (s.d.) values for each mental health-friendly city (MHFC) characteristic are reported grouped by socioecological level and three framings described in the Analysis: immediacy of impact; ability to help youth thrive in cities; and ease or feasibility of implementation. Overall ranks (along with mean and s.d. values) for the total sample are reported. n values in bold represent the number of participants responding for each domain; the percentages in bold represent the percentage of respondents per domain. The number and percentage of the sample that assigned the highest rank for each characteristic are also reported (column 2). The colour continuum from light blue to dark blue shows the highest ranked means in the lightest shades and the lower ranks in darker blue.

figure 4

See the caption of Fig. 3 for details.

figure 5

See the caption of Fig. 3 for details. LGBT+, people from sexual and gender minorities.

The characteristics

We grouped 37 city characteristics across 6 socioecological domains: personal, interpersonal, community, organizational, policy and environmental. Figures 3 – 5 show the mean ranking for each framing and the total mean ranking averaged across frames. We show, for each characteristic statement, the number and percentage of panellists who ranked it highest. The five characteristics in the personal domain centre on factors that enable healthy emotional maturation for young people, future orientation and self-reflexivity. Most panellists (53%) ranked these characteristics according to immediacy of impact on youth mental health in cities, and mean rankings were identical to those linked to ability to help youth thrive in cities. The characteristic that describes prioritizing teaching life skills, providing opportunities for personal development and providing resources that allow young people to flourish rose to the top mean rank for each frame and was also ranked first in this domain by the largest number of panellists ( n  = 93). Notably, the characteristic that describes preparing youth to handle their emotions and overcome challenges was ranked first by 62 panellists, although its mean rank was much lower.

Characteristics in the interpersonal domain refer to young people’s interactions with others in the environment. Prioritized characteristics in this domain centred on relationships marked by acceptance and respect for young people and noted the value of intergenerational relationships. The top-ranked characteristic emphasized age friendliness and interactions that value the feelings and opinions of young people as well as safe and healthy relationships. In this domain, ranked means for characteristics framed according to immediacy of impact on youth mental health and ability to help youth thrive were the same for the top two characteristics. Notably, the two highest-ranked means for ease of implementation focused on opportunities for safe and healthy relationships and strengthening intergenerational relationships.

Young people’s intrapersonal experiences and interpersonal relationships are nested within a system of community and organizational relationships. Study participants prioritized access to safe spaces for youth to gather and connect among the three characteristics in the domain of community, and rankings were identical for each framing. At the organizational domain, two characteristics shared high mean rankings: employment opportunities that allow job security and satisfaction and a responsive and supportive educational system. Health-care services and educational services were the organizations most frequently referenced in relation to youth mental health. Whereas employment opportunities ranked first in terms of feasibility of implementation, provision of youth-friendly health services ranked first for immediacy of impact on youth mental health. With the exception of the community and organizational domains, more panellists chose to frame their responses in terms of immediacy of impact on youth mental health.

Of the four statements in the policy domain, the design and planning of cities with youth input and gender sensitivity ranked highest overall and was most frequently ranked first by panellists (30.68%). Promoting democratic cooperation and equal opportunity and anti-discrimination in all institutions received the highest mean rank for feasibility of implementation.

The sixth socioecological domain lists 13 characteristics related to the social, cultural and physical environments. Addressing adverse social determinants of health for young people had the highest overall ranked mean; however, normalizing youth seeking mental health care and addressing service gaps ranked first when framed by feasibility of implementation and immediacy of impact. Having access to affordable basic amenities was most frequently ranked first in this domain by panellists, but panellist preferences were distributed across the list.

COVID-19 and urban youth well-being

Our data collection began in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, and by survey 2 (August 2020), most countries were experiencing the pandemic’s public health, social and economic effects. In light of this, we added an open-ended survey question to which 255 participants responded “How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your ideas about the wellbeing of young people in cities?” ( Methods ). Most respondents reported changes in perspective or new emphases on inequities as determinants of youth well-being and mental health, whereas nine reported that COVID-19 did not change their ideas. For one such respondent (in the >35 years age category), the pandemic merely confirmed the powerful effect of social vulnerabilities on risk and outcomes during an emergency: “COVID-19 has not changed my ideas about the wellbeing of young people in cities. I found that the young people in cities who did well during the lockdown period and the difficult period of the pandemic were those who were already doing well in terms of a rich social network, good interpersonal relations with family and friends, enjoyable work life, a close religious network, membership [in] a young people’s club so that they were able to stay connected via social media. Those who had access to food and essential commodities and those who knew they would return to school or work after the pandemic. Those who had access to good living conditions and some space for recreation also did well. ... The impact of COVID19 was felt much more by those with existing mental health conditions, living in crowded slums, poverty, unemployment, who were uncertain about the next step”.

Respondents highlighted losses young people experienced as a result of the pandemic. These included loss of the city as a place of opportunity; loss of jobs, familial and individual income, and economic stability; loss of a planned future and loss of certainty; loss of rites of passage of youth; loss of access to friends, social networks and social support; loss of access to quality education and to health care, especially mental health care and sexual and reproductive health services; loss of opportunities for psychological and social development; and loss of loved ones who died from COVID-19. We summarize the qualitative findings according to the socioecological framework. We present sample quotes in Table 2 , along with the age category of the respondents (18–24, 25–35 and >35) and actions for cities to take.

Policy and environment

Governance and equity.

Freedom from discrimination and the value of equity were listed among the mental health-friendly city characteristics; however, respondents pointed out the dearth of equity that COVID-19 unveiled (see the first quote in Table 2 ).

Respondents observed that policy responses to COVID-19, including mandated curfews and quarantines, shifted the social and economic environment of cities. Young people and their families lost economic opportunities, and cities also became less affordable during the pandemic. Participants explained that poverty and job loss worsened young people’s mental health and well-being and exposed youth to more risk factors because they needed to “hustle or work to place food on the table”. The loss of jobs also deprived youth of hope and underlined the economic inequities that some felt marked their generation more than previous ones. One participant (18–24) reported “Before, I used to think youths need someone who can understand them, empathize with them, but looking at the current scenario, I feel youths need security and a hopeful future too”. In some settings, these economic shifts resulted in an exodus from cities. A respondent (18–24) observed “Cities have always attracted young people but since the pandemic started the cost of living has gone from being a barrier to being another factor in encouraging young people to leave”.

Urban built environment

For those who remained in the city, the urban built environment could also offer respite from pandemic-related restrictions in mobility when green spaces and other open spaces were accessible. Participants alluded to cramped urban housing, crowded slums and poor housing infrastructure as stressors that the availability of safe public spaces alleviated. Green space in particular provided solace for young people. A participant (18–24) responded “It’s difficult when you’re confined to the limited space especially when you’re not closer to nature. Negative thoughts get you one way or another even if you try your best. Pandemic has caused more depression I reckon among the youths”. Accessible green space was highlighted as a need and an area for investing effort and policy change (Table 2 ). A desire for clean, youth-friendly green space for safe gathering and recreation was contrasted with unplanned land use and confined spaces, the latter of which some participants linked to greater risks for young people.

Community and organizations

Respondents reported diminished access to education and health care, and a disregard of young people’s needs by decision-makers (Table 2 ). Some responses criticized the lack of forethought before the pandemic to budget for and provide supportive learning environments for youth of all socioeconomic strata. The closure of schools generated stress for young people with the disruption of routines and opportunities to socialize. The pandemic generated greater uncertainty about job opportunities and future trajectories. At the same time, the pandemic brought opportunities to position youth as either contributors and leaders or detractors from community life. Young people reflected on how they experienced inclusion, empathy and exclusion, as well as opportunity for leadership. One respondent (25–35) commented “Our worlds are changing and with it many of our expectations about our education, work, personal interactions and relationships. Instead of being met with understanding, we are collectively positioned as transgressors of social distancing in a way that fails to understand that we are often incredibly vulnerable in this new world and left exposed by lack of infrastructure, service provision and support”.

A respondent (18–24) noticed possibilities for involving young people in responses that could mitigate their numerous losses: “Given the opportunities and resources, young people can be a carrier of change and wellbeing if adults trust them enough to be”.

Interpersonal domain

Getting through difficult times required interpersonal supports: connectedness through in-person encounters in safe spaces, complemented by digital interactions. Multiple respondents emphasized the relationship between social isolation and poor mental health among city youth during the pandemic, noting the difficulty of making meaningful connection during a time of physical isolation. Two young respondents (18–24) said the well-being of young people was linked to being “in a group of people”, which provides “safety and unity”, and to “inclusion, activity, and interpersonal relationships”. Space repeatedly emerged as a theme, as a conduit to facilitate social connection for young people without risk of COVID-19 transmission, violence, sexual abuse or exposure to drug use. Some participants called for greater investment in creating strong, safe virtual communities for young people; however, although participants identified virtual spaces as a resource for mental health support, a young panellist (18–24) remarked of social media and technology that “It isolated people, even though we have … ways of staying connected 24/7, we still feel lonely.”

Consistent with the lead mental health-friendly city characteristic in the personal domain (Figs. 3 – 5 ), the pandemic prompted realization of the need for personal skills development to support youth mental well-being. Some respondents expressed concern about the loss of social skills among young people as a result of confinement and an 18–24-year-old commented “… Youths are in that stage where they need to be equipped with skills to promote positive mental wellbeing”. Another young person (18–24) remarked “Most of us do not really have the capacity and necessary skills to support each other when it comes to mental health”. Participants described the importance of being prepared for unpredictable circumstances and enabling youth to “manage themselves, their emotions, and wellbeing”.

Pandemic-related gains

In some cases, the pandemic brought positive experiences for young people, including more time for self-reflection and discovery, engaging in healing practices, more opportunities to connect with friends, and overall, a greater societal and individual focus on strengthening mental health. A participant (25–35) referred to young people: “They are more conscious about health and their wellbeing by reducing workload and connecting with nature”. Others believed the pandemic revealed young people’s capacity to adapt and to consider the needs of their elders. Some viewed the social justice uprisings that occurred in many countries as a positive vehicle for change and cooperation with others. Changing these conditions would require longer-term solutions: strengthening urban infrastructure and addressing the underlying drivers of inequity. Another participant (>35) lauded the power of youth activism: “… the pandemic has shown us that the resilience of youth is great, as well as the commitment and solidarity with their communities through volunteering, advocacy and youth mobilization”.

Our study convened a multinational and multidisciplinary panel of researchers, practitioners, advocates and young people to identify the characteristics of a mental health-friendly city for youths. The characteristics are distributed among six socioecological domains (Figs. 3 – 5 ) that encompass the personal development of young people, supportive educational systems, people-centred health care, a built environment responsive to the needs of young people, and equity-focused policy-making and governance. Within each of these domains, the characteristics we identified are associated with an evolving evidence base linked to youth mental health outcomes and to potential policy intervention.

Intrapersonal characteristics in our list underline the centrality of enabling young people to cultivate skills to manage their interior lives. The targets of such skills-building activities align with proposed ‘active ingredients’ of mental health interventions, such as intervention components related to mechanisms of action or clinical effects on depressive or anxiety symptoms 35 . Examples include affective awareness skills that enable young people to differentiate and describe emotions 36 and emotion regulation skills to increase and maintain positive emotions 37 . Youth-friendly mental health and educational services, a priority theme at the community level of the framework, could support the intrapersonal realm by deploying a variety of interventions for self-control that benefit adolescent and young adult academic, behavioural and social functioning 38 . Such interventions can also be implemented in earlier childhood educational settings through integration into the curriculum or through other community-based medical or social service organizations 39 . Interventions implemented in selected high-income settings include Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies 40 , the Incredible Years 41 and Family Check-up 42 . For young adults, interventions that convey skills to alleviate common psychological problems such as procrastination, perfectionism, low self-esteem, test anxiety and stress could potentially reduce the prevalence of specific mental health conditions while possibly providing acceptable and non-stigmatizing options for care 43 , 44 .

Our data suggest that a defining theme of any mental health-friendly city for youth is the quality of young people’s social fabric and the city’s ability to provide young people with the skills, opportunities and places required to build and maintain healthy social relationships with their peers, across generations, and as members of a community. The relationships of concern in the interpersonal realm have intrinsic value for healthy adolescent and youth development, promoting well-being 45 and prevention of depression 46 , 47 . Panellists also linked opportunities to socialize and build social networks to the availability of safe spaces, the top-ranked priority in the community domain. Achieving safety necessitates equitable and violence-free institutions and cities 48 , a priority that panellists ranked first for ease of implementation in the policy domain. Thus, policies and legislation are required that reduce neglect, bullying, harassment, abuse, censorship, exposure to violence and a wide range of threats towards young people, from homelessness to crime to intimidation by officials 48 , 49 .

Exposure to community violence and household violence consistently worsens mental health outcomes for youth 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ; successful reduction of urban violence should be prioritized. Equity-focused responses to safety needs should include reducing discriminatory physical and structural violence against young people based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or mental health status, which place youth at risk of harmful exposures: rape or trafficking of adolescent girls or police killings of North American Black youth. To create urban spaces in which young people can experience safety, freedom and belongingness requires approaches that actively prevent discrimination 54 and that consider young people’s multiple identities in the design of institutional as well as outdoor spaces. Women-only parks create greater security for girls and young women and potentially more positive social interaction in some settings 55 .

The benefits of green space, measured as self-satisfaction for adolescents, are linked to greater social contact (for example, more close friends), underscoring space as a conduit for social connection 55 . The advantages of healthy urban spaces for adolescents have emerged not only in health sciences research but also in allied fields such as urban design and sociology 27 , 56 , 57 . Urban spaces with opportunities for active commute options to and from school are associated with increased physical activity and environmental supportiveness 58 . Similarly, the presence of community spaces, such as town centres, is associated with improved social connectedness and sense of belonging 59 .

The critical importance of social connectedness was reinforced in the COVID-19 responses. Yet, in many cities the pandemic eliminated spaces that foster urban conviviality, often with lasting effects 60 . Restricted movement and COVID-19 transmission risk associated with public transport may have contributed to greater stress for urban dwellers and ongoing reluctance to use these services 61 . Such factors contribute to social isolation, which may persist in the near term. Consistent with our COVID-19 data, responses from a sample of Australian youth identified social isolation, interrupted education and work, and uncertainty about the future among the primary negative effects of COVID-19 pandemic 62 . In several studies, loneliness increased the risk of mental health conditions among young people during prior epidemics; of relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic, the duration of loneliness predicted future mental health problems 63 .

Analysis of our survey 2 data revealed differences in the priorities of young participants (18–24 and 25–35) compared with panellists over age 35. This discrepancy could have implications for urban decision-makers whose plans to implement positive actions on behalf of young people may not align with what is most salient for youth. Thus, youth involvement in policy development is even more crucial. Soliciting youth perspectives about what supports their mental health based on their personal experiences could simplify and improve interventions intended for them 64 . Several actions could facilitate meaningful youth engagement in governance: encourage collaboration between governments and youth organizations to co-create and co-lead national action plans; implement mechanisms within global governance organizations for youth consultation at local, national and international levels; require inclusion of young people on relevant conference agendas; and improve access to funding for youth-led organizations 65 , 66 .

Notably, the themes of equity and elimination of discrimination due to race, gender, sexual orientation and neurodiversity arose frequently in the responses to the survey and the COVID-19 question, as did the adversities to which minoritized groups are vulnerable (for example, community violence, police violence and bullying; Figs. 4 and 5 ). A city that is free of discrimination and racism ranked first among policy responses with immediacy of impact on the mental health of youth—even though no statements proposed dismantling systems of oppression that underlie racism and discrimination, as one respondent noted (Fig. 4 ). Globally, racism, xenophobia and other forms of discrimination increase mortality and harm the mental health of affected groups through stress-related physiological responses, harmful environmental exposures and limited access to opportunities and health services 20 , 67 , 68 , 69 . Embedded racist and xenophobic norms, policies and practices of institutions—including those that govern educational, labour and health care systems—yield racialized outcomes for young people around the world (for example, high incidence of HIV infection among adolescent girls in southern sub-Saharan Africa) 20 . To disrupt these forces requires multiple approaches, including recognition and remedy of historical injustices, the activism of social movements committed to change, and implementation of legal frameworks based in human rights norms 70 .

When participants ranked characteristics for ease of implementation (Figs. 3 – 5 ), they coalesced around a broad set of factors demonstrating the need for collaboration across urban sectors (for example, normalizing seeking mental health care, promoting democratic cooperation and equal opportunity, and creating employment opportunities and progressive educational systems). This need for cooperation is perhaps most apparent for actions that increase equity. Successful cooperation requires a clear, shared vision and mission, allocation of funding in each sector, diversity of funding sources, distributed decision-making and authority across sectors, and policies that facilitate collaboration 71 . However, well-intentioned cross-sectoral responses to urban needs may inadvertently increase inequities by designing programmes influenced by market forces that magnify environmental privilege (that is, unequal exposure to environmental problems according to social privilege) 54 . Examples include gentrification and development that use land to create green spaces but further dislocate and marginalize communities in need of affordable housing 54 . Implementing community- and youth-partnered processes for urban health equity policy co-creation could yield unified agendas and help to circumvent inequitable outcomes 54 , 72 . A mental health-friendly city must be positioned to support, integrate and enable the thriving of marginalized and vulnerable young people of the society, who should be involved in its governance.

Strengths and limitations

Our study has several strengths. First, this priority-setting study yielded a rich dataset of recommended characteristics of a mental health-friendly city for young people from a globally diverse panel of more than 480 individuals from 53 countries. Second, we welcomed expertise from participants with roles relevant to urban sectors: researchers, policymakers and practice-based participants, and we engaged young people in the study advisory board and as study participants, capitalizing on their lived experience. Third, we captured information about how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced participants’ ideas about urban adolescent mental health. Fourth, to our knowledge, this is the first study that brings together a large and multidisciplinary set of stakeholders concerned for cities (for example, urban designers) and for youth mental health (for example, teachers and health professionals) to identify priorities for intersectoral action.

Our study also has several limitations. First, the participants recruited do not reflect the full social and economic diversity of urban populations whom city governments and decision-makers must serve. Our decision to use a web-based format following standard health research priority-setting methods required tradeoffs. We sought disciplinary, age and geographic diversity; however, our sample does not represent the most marginalized groups of adolescents or adults. Rather, the recruitment of academics, educators, leaders and well-networked young people through an online study probably minimizes the number of participants living in adversity. Although we also recruited young people who were not necessarily established experts, many were students or members of advocacy or international leadership networks and were not likely to exemplify the most disadvantaged groups. We risk masking the specific viewpoints or needs of marginalized and at-risk young people. However, we are reassured by the prominence of equity as a theme and the call to address social determinants of health. Second, it is possible that participants recruited through the authors’ professional networks may be more likely to reflect the viewpoints of the advisory committee members who selected them, given collaborative or other professional relationships. This may have shaped the range of responses and their prioritization. Third, the aspirational calls for an end to discrimination and inequalities highlighted in our results require confronting long-standing structural inequities both within and between countries. Structural violence frequently maintains these power imbalances. Although we do not view their aspirational nature as a limitation, we note that our study data do not outline the complexity of responses required to address these determinants of mental health or to dismantle discriminatory structures. Fourth, our data present several aggregated characteristics that may require disaggregation as cities contextualize the findings for their settings. Fifth, our network recruitment strategy led to skewed recruitment from some geographic regions (for example, North America and Nepal), which may have biased responses (Extended Data Figs. 1 – 3 ). Extended Data Table 1 shows the similarities and differences in the rankings for Nepal, USA and the remaining countries in survey 3. Additionally, we recruited few 14–17-year-olds. We experienced attrition over the three rounds of surveying, ending with complete responses from 261 individuals from 48 countries, with the greatest loss in participants between surveys 1 and 2 (Table 1 ), among the 14–17-, 18–24- and 25–35-year-old age groups, and among participants from Nepal (Extended Data Fig. 2 ).

Conclusions

We identified a set of priorities for cities that require intervention at multiple levels and across urban sectors. A clear next step could involve convenings to build national or regional consensus around local priorities and plans to engage stakeholders to co-design implementation of the most salient characteristics of a mental health-friendly city for youth in specific cities (Box 1 ). It is likely that many variables (for example, geography, politics, culture, race, ethnicity and sexual identity) will shape priorities in each city. Therefore, essential to equitable action is ensuring that an inclusive community of actors is at the table formulating and making decisions, and that pathways for generating knowledge of mental health-friendly city characteristics remain open. This includes representation of sectors beyond mental health that operate at the intersection of areas prioritized by young people. Preparing for implementation will require avenues for youth participation and influence through collective action, social entrepreneurship and representation in national, regional and community decision-making. Enlisting the participation of youth networks that bring young people marginalized owing to sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, economic status, ethnicity or caste; young people with disabilities; and youth and adults with lived experience of mental health conditions in the design of mental health-friendly cities will help to level power imbalances and increase the likelihood that cities meet their needs.

Action for adolescent mental health aligns well with actions nations should take to achieve development targets, and collective action to draw attention to these areas of synergy could benefit youth and cities. Specifically, supporting the mental health of young people aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 11 (sustainable cities and communities) and the New Urban Agenda that aims to “ensure sustainable and inclusive urban economies, to end poverty and to ensure equal rights and opportunities … and integration into the urban space” 73 , 74 , 75 .

Additionally, the list of mental health-friendly city characteristics presents a starting point for strengthening the evidence base on intervening at multiple levels (for example, individual, family, community, organizations and environment) to better understand what works for which youth in which settings. Cities function as complex systems, and systems-centred research can best enable us to understand how individuals’ interactions with one another and with their environments influence good or poor mental health 76 . Similarly, interdisciplinary inquiry is needed that investigates urban precarity and sheds light on social interventions for youth mental health 77 . New research that tests implementation strategies and measures mental health outcomes of coordinated cross-sectoral interventions in cities could be integrated with planned actions. Innovative uses of data that measure the ‘racial opportunity gap’ can help cities to understand how race and place interact to reduce economic well-being for minoritized young people on their trajectory to adulthood 78 . Even heavily studied relationships, such as mental health and green space, can benefit from new methodologies for measuring exposures, including application of mixed methods, and refined characterization of outcomes by gender and age with a focus on adolescents and youth 79 . Globally, mental health-supporting actions for young people in urban areas have an incomplete evidence base, with more peer-reviewed publications skewed towards North American research 73 .

Designing mental health-friendly cities for young people is possible. It requires policy approaches that facilitate systemic, sustained intersectoral commitments at the global as well as local levels 80 . It also requires creative collaboration across multiple sectors because the characteristics identified range from transport to housing to employment to health, with a central focus on social and economic equity. Acting on these characteristics demands coordinated investment, joint planning and decision-making among urban sectoral leaders, and strategic deployment of human and financial resources across local government departments that shape city life and resources 75 , 81 . This process will be more successful when cities intentionally and accountably implement plans to dismantle structural racism and other forms of discrimination to provide equitable access to economic and educational opportunities for young people, with the goal of eliminating disparate health and social outcomes. The process is made easier when diverse stakeholders identify converging interests and interventions that allow them each to achieve their goals.

Box 1 Considerations for implementing a mental health-friendly city for youth

Considerations for implementing a mental health-friendly city for youth using a structure adapted from UNICEF’s strategic framework for the second decade of life 82 and integrating selected characteristics identified in the study with examples distilled from scientific literature and from project advisory group members. Objectives for implementation along with corresponding examples and selected initiatives are shown.

Youth are equipped with resources and skills for personal and emotional development, compassion, self-acceptance, and flourishing.

Youth develop and sustain safe, healthy relationships and strong intergenerational bonds in age-friendly settings that respect, value and validate them.

Communities promote youth integration and participation in all areas of community life.

Communities establish and maintain safe, free public spaces for youth socializing, learning and connection.

Institutions facilitate satisfying, secure employment; progressive, inclusive, violence-free education; skills for mental health advocacy and peer support.

Policies support antiracist, gender equitable, non-discriminatory cities that promote democratic cooperation and non-violence.

Urban environments provide safe, reliable infrastructure for basic amenities and transportation; affordable housing; access to green and blues space; and access to recreation and art.

Cities minimize adverse social determinants of health; design for safety and security for vulnerable groups; and orient social and built environments to mental health promotion, belonging and purpose.

Use rights-based approaches

Prioritize equity for racially, ethnically, gender, sexually and neurologically diverse young people

Ensure sustained and authentic participation of youth

Schools and other educational settings

Health and social services

Families and communities

Religious and spiritual institutions

Child protection and justice systems

Peer groups

Civil society

Digital and non-digital media

Implementation objectives

Build consensus and contextualize the mental health-friendly city approach at local, regional, national levels

Engage diverse youth in co-design of mental health-friendly city plans

Expand opportunities for youth governance

Enable collaboration among sectors for policy alignment

Engage communities, schools, health services, media for intervention delivery

Legislate social protection policies

Scale interventions to improve economic and behavioral outcomes

Link implementation to achievement of national or international objectives

Selected implementation strategies

Youth co-design and participation: Growing Up Boulder is an initiative to create more equitable and sustainable communities in which young people participate and influence issues that affect them. It is a partnership between local schools, universities, local government, businesses and local non-profit organizations in the USA that has enabled young people to formally participate in visioning processes such as community assessments, mapping, photo documentation and presentations to city representatives 83 .

Engaging schools for interventions: universal school-based interventions for mental health promotion 84 ; linkage to mental health care for school-based programs 85 ; “Whole-school approaches” that engage students and families, communities, and other agencies to support mental health and improve academic outcomes 84 , 86 .

Digital platforms for youth mental health: Chile’s HealthyMind Initiative digital platform launched during the COVID-19 pandemic and provided a one-stop resource for information and digital mental health services. The platform included targeted evidence-based resources for children and adolescents 87 .

Interventions to test at scale: Stepping Stones and Creating Futures is a community-based intervention for intimate partner violence reduction and strengthening livelihoods in urban informal settlements in South Africa that reduced young men’s perpetration of intimate partner violence and increased women’s earning power 88 .

Shared international objectives: support Sustainable Development Goal 11 and New Urban Agenda targets and Sustainable Development Goals 1–6, 8, 10 and 16.

Project structure and launch

This study aimed to identify priorities for creating cities that promote and sustain adolescent and youth mental health. Central to achieving this aim was our goal of engaging a multidisciplinary, global, age-diverse group of stakeholders. As we began and throughout the study, we were cognizant of the risk of attrition, the importance of maintaining multidisciplinary participation throughout the study and the value of preserving the voices of young people. We used a priority-setting methodology explicitly aimed to be inclusive while simultaneously limiting study attrition. To ensure that we were inclusive of the voices of young people and our large and diverse sample, we limited our study to three surveys, which we determined a priori. Our approach was informed by standard methodologies for health research priority setting 32 .

The project was led by a collaborative team from the University of Washington Consortium for Global Mental Health, Urban@UW, the University of Melbourne and citiesRISE. We assembled three committees representing geographic, national, disciplinary, gender and age diversity to guide the work. First, a core team of P.Y.C., T.W., G.P., M.S. and T.C., generated an initial list of recommended members of the scientific advisory board on the basis of their research and practice activities related to adolescent mental health or the urban setting. We sought a multidisciplinary group representing relevant disciplines. The 18-member scientific advisory board, comprising global leaders in urban design and architecture, social entrepreneurship, education, mental health and adolescent development, provided scientific guidance. We invited members of an executive committee, who represented funding agencies as well as academic and non-governmental organizational leadership, to provide a second level of feedback. A youth advisory board, recruited through citiesRISE youth leaders and other global mental health youth networks, comprised global youth leaders in mental health advocacy. A research team from the University of Washington (Urban@UW, the University of Washington Population Health Initiative and the University of Washington Consortium for Global Mental Health) provided study coordination. The study received institutional review board approval at the University of Washington (STUDY00008502). Invitations to advisory groups were sent in December 2019, along with a concept note describing the aims of the project, and committee memberships were confirmed in January 2020. In February 2020, the committees formulated the question for survey 1: “What are the characteristics of a mental health friendly city for young people?”.

Study recruitment

The members of the scientific advisory board, youth advisory board and executive committee were invited to nominate individuals with expertise across domains relevant to urban life and adolescent well-being. The group recommended 763 individuals to join the priority-setting panel; individuals invited to serve on the scientific advisory board, youth advisory board and executive committee were included in panel invitations ( n  = 38). Our goal was to establish a geographically diverse panel of participants with scientific, policy and practice-based expertise corresponding to major urban sectors and related challenges (for example, health, education, urban planning and design, youth and criminal justice, housing and homelessness, and violence). Many of the nominees were experts with whom the core group and scientific advisory board members had collaborated, as well as individuals recruited on the basis of their participation in professional and scientific associations and committees (for example, Lancet Commissions and Series) or global practice networks (for example, Teach for All). Nominees’ names, the advisory member who nominated them, gender, country and discipline were tracked by T.C. We used snowball sampling to recruit participants from geographic regions that were under-represented: an additional 24 people were recruited through referrals. The scientific advisory board and youth advisory board sought to maximize the number of young people participating in the study, and invitations were extended to adolescents and young adults through educational, professional, advocacy and advisory networks. Nominees received an invitation letter by e-mail, accompanied by a concept note that introduced the study, defined key constructs, described the roles of the study advisory groups and provided an estimated study timeline. Youth participants (14–24) received a more abbreviated introductory letter. A link to a REDCap survey with an informed consent form and round 1 question was embedded in the invitation e-mail, which was offered in English and Spanish. Of the 824 individuals invited, 518 individuals from 53 countries provided informed consent and agreed to participate, resulting in a nomination acceptance rate of 62.8%.

Data collection

We administered a series of three sequential surveys using REDCap version 9.8.2. Panellists were asked to respond to the survey 1 question “What are the characteristics of a mental health friendly city for young people?” by providing up to five characteristics and were invited to use as much space as needed. In survey 2, panellists received 134 characteristic statements derived from survey 1 data and were asked to select their 40 most important statements. From these data, we selected 40 most frequently ranked statements. These were presented in the round 3 survey with three redundant statements removed. The remaining 37 characteristic statements were categorized across 6 socioecological domains and panellists were asked to select 1 of 3 framings by which to rank the statements in each domain: immediacy of impact on youth mental health in cities, ability to help youth thrive in cities, and ease or feasibility of implementation. Of individuals who consented to participate, 93.4% completed round 1, 58.5% completed round 2 and 56.2% completed round 3 (Table 1 ).

We added a new open-ended question to survey 2: “How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your ideas about the wellbeing of young people in cities?”. Panellists were invited to respond using as many characters (that is, as much space) as needed.

Data analysis

Three-survey series.

We managed the survey 1 data using ATLAS.ti 8 software for qualitative data analysis and conducted a conventional content analysis of survey 1 data 89 . Given the multidisciplinarity of the topic and our multidisciplinary group of respondents, we selected an inductive method of analysis to reflect, as simply as possible, the priorities reported by the study sample without imposing disciplinary frameworks. In brief, responses were read multiple times, and characteristics were highlighted in the text. A list of characteristics (words and phrases) was constructed, and we coded the data according to emerging categories (for example, accessibility, basic amenities, career, built environment, mental health services and so on). The analysis yielded 19 broad categories with 423 characteristics. Within each category, characteristics were grouped into statements that preserved meaning while streamlining the list, which yielded 134 characteristic statements. The University of Washington research team convened a 1-week series of data discussions with youth advisers to review the wording of the characteristics and ensure their comprehensibility among readers from different countries. The survey 1 categorized data were reviewed by members of the scientific advisory board, who recommended that using relevant domains to group characteristics would provide meaningful context to the final list. We used IBM SPSS 28.0 for quantitative analyses of data from surveys 2 and 3. In survey 2, we analysed the frequency of endorsement of the 40 characteristics selected by panellists and generated a ranked list of all responses, with the most frequently endorsed at the top. The decision to select 40 characteristics aligned with methods applied in a previous priority-setting exercise 90 and permitted a list of preferred characteristics that could subsequently be categorized according to a known framework, allowing city stakeholders a broad list from which to select actions. We also analysed frequency of endorsement by age categories (18–24, 25–35 and >35). To amplify the viewpoints of younger participants (under age 35), we combined the top 25 characteristic statements of panellists over 35 with the top 26 characteristic statements of participants under 35 to generate a list of 40 statements, including 11 shared ranked characteristics. As noted, we removed three of these statements because of their redundancy. In survey 3, we analysed data consisting of 37 characteristic statements divided across 6 socioecological domains. Characteristics in each domain were ranked according to one of three framings. We calculated mean ranking and standard deviation for characteristics in each framing category per socioecological domain. Mean rankings (with standard deviation) were calculated across framing categories to arrive at the total mean rank per characteristic and they reflect the proportional contribution of each domain. We also calculated the frequency with which panellists ranked each characteristic statement number 1.

Our study methods align with good practices for health research priority setting as follows 32 .

Context: we defined a clear focus of the study.

Use of a comprehensive approach: we outlined methods, time frame and intentions for the results before beginning the study; however, we modified (that is, simplified) the methods for survey 3 to minimize study attrition.

Inclusiveness: we prioritized recruiting for broad representation and maintaining engagement of an inclusive participant group, and methodological decisions were made in service of this priority.

Information gathering: our reviews of the literature showed that a study bringing together these key stakeholders had not been conducted, despite the need.

Planning for implementation: we recognized from the outset that additional convening at regional levels would be required to implement action, and our network members are able to move the agenda forwards.

Criteria: we determined criteria for the priorities (framing: feasibility of implementation, immediacy of impact and ability to help youth thrive) that study participants used and which we believe will be useful for practical implementation.

Methods for deciding on priorities: we determined that rank order would be used to determine priorities.

Evaluation: not applicable; we have not planned an evaluation of the impact of priority setting in this phase of work.

Transparency: the manuscript preparation, review and revisions enable us to present findings with transparency.

COVID-19 qualitative data

We managed the COVID-19 qualitative data using Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. We carried out a rapid qualitative analysis 91 . First, the text responses were read and re-read multiple times. We coded the data for content related to expressions of change, no change or areas of emphasis in participants’ perceptions of youth mental health in cities during the pandemic. We focused our attention on data that highlighted changes. We further segmented the data by participant age categories, domains of change and suggested actions, and we assigned socioecological level of changes. We created a matrix using excerpted or highlighted text categorized according to these categories. Three data analysts (P.Y.C., T.C. and A.M.-K.) reviewed the domains of change and identified emerging themes, which were added to the matrix and linked to quotes. The team discussed the themes and came to consensus on assignment to a socioecological level. We prioritized reporting recurring concepts (for example, themes of loss, inequity, green space, isolation and mental illnesses) and contrasting concepts (for example, gains associated with COVID-19) and associated actions 92 .

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

Survey data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, P.Y.C., on reasonable request. The sharing of data must comply with institutional policies that require a formal agreement (between the corresponding author and the requester) for sharing and release of data under limits permissible by the institutional review board.

Gruebner, O. et al. Cities and mental health. Deutsch. Arztebl. Int. 114 , 121–127 (2017).

Google Scholar  

van der Wal, J. M. et al. Advancing urban mental health research: from complexity science to actionable targets for intervention. Lancet Psychiatry 8 , 991–1000 (2021).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

UNICEF Innovation & ARM. Innovation for Children in an Urbanizing World: a Use-Case Handbook , https://www.unicef.org/innovation/reports/innovation-children-urbanizing-world (UNICEF, 2017).

Galea, S. The urban brain: new directions in research exploring the relation between cities and mood-anxiety disorders. Depress. Anxiety 28 , 857–862 (2011).

March, D. et al. Psychosis and place. Epidemiol. Rev. 30 , 84–100 (2008).

Faris, R. & Dunham, H. Mental Disorders in Urban Areas (Univ. Chicago Press, 1939).

de Leeuw, E. in Healthy Cities: The Theory, Policy, and Practice of Value-Based Urban Planning (eds de Leeuw, E. & Simos, J.) Ch. 1, 3–30 (Springer, 2017).

Duhl, L. J. The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis (Simon and Schuster, 1963).

Vlahov, D., Ettman, C. K. & Galea, S. in Urban Health (eds Galea, S. et al.) Ch. 44 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2019).

Urbanization and Development: Emerging Futures (UN-Habitat, 2016).

Anglin, D. M. et al. From womb to neighborhood: a racial analysis of social determinants of psychosis in the United States. Am. J. Psychiatry 178 , 599–610 (2021).

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Hancock, T. & Duhl, L. Promoting Health in the Urban Context WHO Healthy Cities Papers No. 1 (FADL, 1986).

Okkels, N., Kristiansen, C. B., Munk-Jørgensen, P. & Sartorius, N. Urban mental health: challenges and perspectives. Curr. Opin. Psychiatry 31 , 258–264 (2018).

Kessler, R., Berglund, P., Demler, O., Jin, R. & Merikangas, K. Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey replication. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 62 , 593–602 (2005).

Global Health Data Exchange, Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2020).

Santomauro, D. F. et al. Global prevalence and burden of depressive and anxiety disorders in 204 countries and territories in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lancet 398 , 1700–1712 (2021).

Article   Google Scholar  

Jones, S. et al. Mental health, suicidality, and connectedness among high school students during the COVID-19 pandemic - adolescent behaviors and experiences survey, United States, January-June 2021. Morb. Mortal. Wkly Rep. Suppl. 71 , 16–21 (2022).

Call, K. et al. Adolescent health and well-being in the twenty-first century: a global perspective. J. Res. Adolesc. 12 , 69–98 (2002).

Dahl, R. E., Allen, N. B., Wilbrecht, L. & Suleiman, A. B. Importance of investing in adolescence from a developmental science perspective. Nature 554 , 441–450 (2018).

Article   ADS   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Selvarajah, S. et al. Racism, xenophobia, and discrimination: mapping pathways to health outcomes. Lancet 400 , 2109–2124 (2022).

Hurd, N. M., Stoddard, S. A. & Zimmerman, M. A. Neighborhoods, social support, and African American adolescents’ mental health outcomes: a multilevel path analysis. Child Dev. 84 , 858–874 (2013).

Protecting Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory (ed. Health and Human Services) (Office of the Surgeon General, 2021).

Patton, G. C. et al. Our future: a Lancet commission on adolescent health and wellbeing. Lancet 387 , 2423–2478 (2016).

Bundy, D. A. P. et al. Investment in child and adolescent health and development: key messages from Disease Control Priorities, 3rd Edition. Lancet 391 , 687–699 (2018).

Caruthers, A. S., Van Ryzin, M. J. & Dishion, T. J. Preventing high-risk sexual behavior in early adulthood with family interventions in adolescence: outcomes and developmental processes. Prev. Sci. 15 , 59–69 (2014).

Article   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Stelmach, R. et al. The global return on investment from preventing and treating adolescent mental disorders and suicide: a modelling study. BMJ Glob. Health 7 , e007759 (2022).

Roe, J. & McCay L. Restorative Cities: Urban Design for Mental Health and Wellbeing (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020).

Knöll, M. & Roe, J. J. Ten questions concerning a new adolescent health urbanism. Build. Environ. 126 , 496–506 (2017).

Domaradzka, A. Urban social movements and the right to the city: an introduction to the special issue on urban mobilization. Voluntas 29 , 607–620 (2018).

Sinha, M., Collins, P. & Herrman, H. Collective action for young people’s mental health: the citiesRISE experience. World Psychiatry 18 , 114–115 (2019).

Sinha, M. et al. Towards mental health friendly cities during and after COVID-19. Cities Health https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2020.1790251 (2020).

Viergever, R. F., Olifson, S., Ghaffar, A. & Terry, R. F. A checklist for health research priority setting: nine common themes of good practice. Health Res. Policy Syst. 8 , 36 (2010).

Bronfenbrenner, U. Toward an experimental ecology of human development. Am. Psychol. 32 , 513–531 (1977).

Banati, P. & Lansford, J. E. in Handbook of Adolescent Development Research and its Impact on Global Policy (eds Lansford, J. E. & Banati, P.) Ch. 1, 1–26 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017).

What Science Has Shown Can Help Young People with Anxiety and Depression: Identifying and Reviewing the ‘Active Ingredients’ of Effective Interventions (Wellcome Trust, 2021).

Beames, J. R., Kikas, K. & Werner-Seidler, A. Prevention and early intervention of depression in young people: an integrated narrative review of affective awareness and Ecological Momentary Assessment. BMC Psychol. 9 , 113 (2021).

Daros, A. R. et al. A meta-analysis of emotional regulation outcomes in psychological interventions for youth with depression and anxiety. Nat. Hum. Behav. 5 , 1443–1457 (2021).

Johnson, S. B., Voegtline, K. M., Ialongo, N., Hill, K. G. & Musci, R. J. Self-control in first grade predicts success in the transition to adulthood. Dev. Psychopathol. 35 , 1358–1370 (2023).

Pandey, A. et al. Effectiveness of universal self-regulation-based interventions in children and adolescents: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Pediatr. 172 , 566–575 (2018).

Arda, T. & Ocak, S. Social competence and promoting alternative thinking strategies - PATHS preschool curriculum. Educ. Sci. Theory Pract. 12 , 2691–2698 (2012).

Webster-Stratton, C. Randomized trial of two parent-training programs for families with conduct-disordered children. J. Consult. Clin. Psychol. 52 , 666–678 (1984).

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Hentges, R. F. et al. The long-term indirect effect of the early Family Check-Up intervention on adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms via inhibitory control. Dev. Psychopathol. 32 , 1544–1554 (2020).

Cuijpers, P. et al. The associations of common psychological problems with mental disorders among college students. Front. Psychiatry 12 , 573637 (2021).

Cuijpers, P. Indirect prevention and treatment of depression: an emerging paradigm? Clin. Psychol. Eur. 3 , e6847 (2021).

Blum, R. W., Lai, J., Martinez, M. & Jessee, C. Adolescent connectedness: cornerstone for health and wellbeing. Brit. Med. J. 379 , e069213 (2022).

Filia, K., Eastwood, O., Herniman, S. & Badcock, P. Facilitating improvements in young people’s social relationships to prevent or treat depression: a review of empirically supported interventions. Transl. Psychiatry 11 , 305 (2021).

Herrman, H. et al. Time for united action on depression: a Lancet-World Psychiatric Association Commission. Lancet 399 , 957–1022 (2022).

United Nations Children’s Fund. The State of the World’s Children 2021: on My Mind – Promoting, Protecting and Caring for Children’s Mental Health (UNICEF, 2021).

Massetti, G. M., Hughes, K., Bellis, M. A. & Mercy, J. in Adverse Childhood Experiences (eds Asmundson, G. J. G. & Afifi, T. O.) 209–231 (Academic, 2020).

Bordin, I. Severe physical punishment: risk of mental health problems for poor urban children in Brazil. Bull. World Health Organ. 87 , 336–344 (2009).

Cecil, C. A., Viding, E., Fearon, P., Glaser, D. & McCrory, E. J. Disentangling the mental health impact of childhood abuse and neglect. Child Abuse Negl. 63 , 106–119 (2017).

Giovanelli, A., Reynolds, A. J., Mondi, C. F. & Ou, S. R. Adverse childhood experiences and adult well-being in a low-income, urban cohort. Pediatrics 137 , e20154016 (2016).

Molano, A., Harker, A. & Cristancho, J. C. Effects of indirect exposure to homicide events on children’s mental health: evidence from urban settings in Colombia. J. Youth Adolesc. 47 , 2060–2072 (2018).

Cole, H. et al. Can healthy cities be made really healthy? Lancet Public Health 2 , e394–e395 (2017).

Dadvand, P. et al. Use of green spaces, self-satisfaction and social contacts in adolescents: a population-based CASPIAN-V study. Environ. Res. 168 , 171–177 (2019).

Markevych, I. et al. Access to urban green spaces and behavioural problems in children: results from the GINIplus and LISAplus studies. Environ. Int. 71 , 29–35 (2014).

Thompson, C., Silvereirinha de Oliveira, E., Wheeler, B., Depledge, M. & van den Bosch, M. Urban Green Spaces and Health (WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2016).

Buli, B. G., Tillander, A., Fell, T. & Bälter, K. Active commuting and healthy behavior among adolescents in neighborhoods with varying socioeconomic status: the NESLA study. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 19 , 3784 (2022).

Laine, J. et al. Cost-effectiveness of population-level physical activity interventions: a systematic review. Am. J. Health Promot. 29 , 71–80 (2014).

Martínez, L. & Short, J. R. The pandemic city: urban issues in the time of COVID-19. Sustainability 13 , 3295 (2021).

Mouratidis, K. How COVID-19 reshaped quality of life in cities: a synthesis and implications for urban planning. Land Use Policy 111 , 105772 (2021).

Bell, I. H. et al. The impact of COVID-19 on youth mental health: a mixed methods survey. Psychiatry Res. 321 , 115082 (2023).

Loades, M. E. et al. Rapid systematic review: the impact of social isolation and loneliness on the mental health of children and adolescents in the context of COVID-19. J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry 59 , 1218–1239 (2020).

Ng, M. Y., Eckshtain, D. & Weisz, J. R. Assessing fit between evidence-based psychotherapies for youth depression and real-life coping in early adolescence. J. Clin. Child Adolesc. Psychol. 45 , 732–748 (2016).

O’Kane, C., Haj-Ahmad, J. & Friscia, F. Engaged and Heard! Guidelines on Adolescent Participation and Civic Engagement , https://www.unicef.org/media/73296/file/ADAP-Guidelines-for-Participation.pdf (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2020).

Rahmaty, M. & Leiva Roesch, J. Youth Participation in Global Governance for Sustaining Peace and Climate Action International Peace Institute Issue Briefs, https://www.ipinst.org/2021/04/youth-participation-in-global-governance-for-sustaining-peace-and-climate-action (International Peace Institute, 2021).

Erondu, N. A., Mofokeng, T., Kavanagh, M. M., Matache, M. & Bosha, S. L. Towards anti-racist policies and strategies to reduce poor health outcomes in racialised communities: introducing the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health. Lancet 401 , 1834–1836 (2023).

Fani, N., Carter, S. E., Harnett, N. G., Ressler, K. J. & Bradley, B. Association of racial discrimination with neural response to threat in Black women in the US exposed to trauma. JAMA Psychiatry 78 , 1005–1012 (2021).

Fani, N. et al. Racial discrimination associates with lower cingulate cortex thickness in trauma-exposed black women. Neuropsychopharmacology 47 , 2230–2237 (2022).

Abubakar, I. et al. Confronting the consequences of racism, xenophobia, and discrimination on health and health-care systems. Lancet 400 , 2137–2146 (2022).

Towe, V. L. et al. Cross-sector collaborations and partnerships: essential ingredients to help shape health and well-being. Health Aff. 35 , 1964–1969 (2016).

Walker, S. C. et al. Cocreating evidence-informed health equity policy with community. Health Serv. Res. 57 , 137–148 (2022).

Murphy, L. E., Jack, H. E., Concepcion, T. L. & Collins, P. Y. Integrating urban adolescent mental health into urban sustainability collective action: an application of Shiffman & Smith’s framework for global health prioritization. Front. Psychiatry 11 , 44 (2020).

New Urban Agenda (UN Habitat III Secretariat, 2017).

Health as the Pulse of the New Urban Agenda: United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, Quito (World Health Organization 2016).

Diez Roux, A. V. Health in cities: is a systems approach needed. Cad. Saude Publica 31 , 9–13 (2015).

Pykett, J. et al. Urban precarity and youth mental health: an interpretive scoping review of emerging approaches. Soc. Sci. Med. 320 , 115619 (2023).

O’Brien, R., Neman, T., Seltzer, N., Evans, L. & Venkataramani, A. Structural racism, economic opportunity and racial health disparities: evidence from U.S. counties. SSM Popul. Health 11 , 100564 (2020).

Fleckney, P. & Bentley, R. The urban public realm and adolescent mental health and wellbeing: a systematic review. Soc. Sci. Medicine 284 , 114242 (2021).

de Leeuw, E. & Simos, J. Healthy cities move to Maturity in Healthy Cities (eds de Leeuw, E. & Simos, J.) Ch. 5, 74-86 (Springer, 2017).

Our Cities, Our Health, Our Future: Acting on Social Determinants for Health Equity in Urban Settings - Report to the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health from the Knowledge Network on Urban Settings (World Health Organization, 2008).

UNICEF Programme Guidance for the Second Decade: Programming with and for Adolescents Programme Division 2018, https://www.unicef.org/media/57336/file (UNICEF, 2018).

Growing Up Boulder: Boulder’s Child- and Youth-Friendly City Initiative (Growing Up Boulder, 2015).

O’Reilly, M., Svirydzenka, N., Adams, S. & Dogra, N. Review of mental health promotion interventions in schools. Soc. Psychiatry Psychiatr. Epidemiol. 53 , 647–662 (2018).

Kutcher, S. et al. Creating evidence-based youth mental health policy in sub-Saharan Africa: a description of the integrated approach to addressing the issue of youth depression in Malawi and Tanzania. Front. Psychiatry 10 , 542 (2019).

Shinde, S. et al. Promoting school climate and health outcomes with the SEHER multi-component secondary school intervention in Bihar, India: a cluster-randomised controlled trial. Lancet 392 , 2465–2477 (2018).

A New Agenda for Mental Health in the Americas: Report of the Pan American Health Organization High-Level Commission on Mental Health and COVID-1 9, https://doi.org/10.37774/9789275127223 (Pan American Health Organization, 2023).

Gibbs, A. et al. Stepping Stones and Creating Futures intervention to prevent intimate partner violence among young people: cluster randomized controlled trial. J. Adolesc. Health 66 , 323–335 (2020).

Hsieh, H.-F. & Shannon, S. E. Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qual. Health Res. 15 , 1277–1288 (2005).

Collins, P. Y. et al. Grand challenges in global mental health. Nature 475 , 27–30 (2011).

Article   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Hamilton, A. B. Qualitative Methods in Rapid Turn-around Health Services Research. VA HSR&D National Cyberseminar Series: Spotlight on Women’s Health, 2013, https://www.hsrd.research.va.gov/for_researchers/cyber_seminars/archives/video_archive.cfm?SessionID=780 (2013).

Ryan, G. W. & Bernard, H. R. Techniques to identify themes. Field Methods 15 , 85–109 (2003).

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank M. Antia, S. Talam and J. Vollendroft for contributions to this project; H. Jack for contributions to the manuscript revision; and the survey panellists without whom this work would not have been possible. M.K. was supported in part by funding from the Fogarty International Center (K43 TW010716) and the National Institute of Mental Health (R21 MH124149) of the National Institutes of Health. This study was supported in part by funding to citiesRISE (M.M. and M.H.) from the Rural India Supporting Trust and from Pivotal Ventures. This study was conducted while P.Y.C. was on the faculty at the University of Washington, Seattle. The University of Washington (P.Y.C. and T.C.) received funding from citiesRISE by subcontract. T.D. is a staff member of the World Health Organization (WHO). The content and views expressed in this manuscript are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views, decisions or policies of the institutions with which they are affiliated, including WHO, the US Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA

Pamela Y. Collins, Augustina Mensa-Kwao & Emily Queen

citiesRISE, New York, NY, USA

Moitreyee Sinha & Matthew Hughsam

Department of Global Health, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Tessa Concepcion, Modhurima Moitra & Jürgen Unützer

Centre for Adolescent Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

George Patton

Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, Washington, DC, USA

Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health, London, UK

Layla McCay

Orygen, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Helen Herrman

University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Ecole de Sante Publique, Universite de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Evelyne de Leeuw

Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

Nalini Anand

Aga Khan University, Nairobi, Kenya

Lukoye Atwoli

Grand Challenges Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Nicole Bardikoff

Good South Social Impact Enterprise, Durban, South Africa

Chantelle Booysen

Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru

Inés Bustamante

Sun Yat Sen University, Guangzhou, China

Mental Health America, New York, NY, USA

Kelly Davis

World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland

The TruePoint Center, Boston, MA, USA

Nathaniel Foote

Healthy Brains Global Initiative, Nairobi, Kenya

Damian Juma

Teach for Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal

Shisir Khanal

Department of Population Health, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA

Manasi Kumar

University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya

Sacramento County Board of Education, Sacramento, CA, USA

Bina Lefkowitz

Lefkowitz Consulting, Sacramento, CA, USA

Fajara Associates, London, UK

Peter McDermott

Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Yvonne Ochieng

University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria

Olayinka Omigbodun

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia

José Miguel Uribe-Restrepo

Wellcome Trust, London, UK

Miranda Wolpert

Climate Mental Health Network, Annapolis, MD, USA

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

This study was led by a core group, P.Y.C., G.P., M.S. and T.W., who were members of the project’s scientific advisory board and executive committee and part of the group of 32 co-authors (P.Y.C., M.S., T.C., G.P., T.W., L.M., A.M.-K., L.A., N.B., I.B., Y.C., T.D., E.d.L., N.F., H.H., S.K., M.K., B.L., O.O., J.M.U.-R., C.B., K.D., M.H., D.J., M.M., E.Q., Y.O., L.Z., N.A., P.M., J.U. and M.W.). P.Y.C. and T.C. regularly updated the core group members by e-mail, and P.Y.C. led online meetings with updates on study progress and data collection and study outcomes with members of the scientific advisory board (N.B., I.B., Y.C., T.D., E.d.L., N.F., H.H., S.K., M.K., B.L., O.O., J.M.U.-R. and K.D.), youth advisory board (K.D., C.B., D.J., Y.O., E.Q. and L.Z.) and executive committee (N.A., J.U. and M.W.). P.Y.C. (the core group lead) and members of the scientific advisory board and executive committee were involved with conceptualization, study design and methodology. Youth advisers assisted with qualitative data analysis. P.Y.C., T.C. and A.M.-K. were also responsible for data curation and formal analysis; P.Y.C. and T.C. wrote the original draft, with contribution from G.P., M.S., T.W., H.H. and L.M. P.Y.C., T.C., A.M.-K., M.M., H.H. and E.d.L. reviewed and organized responses to reviewers. All co-authors reviewed responses to the reviewers. P.Y.C. led the manuscript revision with A.M.-K., M.M. and T.C. All co-authors had the opportunity to discuss the results, review full drafts of the manuscript and provide comments on the manuscript at all stages.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pamela Y. Collins .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information.

Nature thanks Rhiannon Corcoran, Sean Grant, Diana Romero, Ezra Susser, J. Phillip Thompson and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended data fig. 1 distribution of participants by nationality (n = 518) a,b,c ..

a Countries Participating: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Canada, China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Ghana, Haiti, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Italy, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Mexico, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Rwanda, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, The Gambia, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, UK, USA, Venezuela, Zambia, Zimbabwe (53 total); b Two responses (“Asian” and “Indigenous and European”) do not list a nation but capture verbatim open-text responses; c Countries with one participant removed from graph and include: Argentina, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Haiti, Hong Kong, Indigenous and European, Mauritius, New Zealand, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, The Gambia, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Venezuela.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Participant Nationality by Survey Round.

a SEA = South-East Asia, NA = North America*, AF = Africa, LSA = Latin & South America*, EU = Europe, WP = Western Pacific, EM = Eastern Mediterranean.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Distribution of Participants by WHO Region * and Survey Round.

a SEA = South-East Asia, NA = North America*, AF = Africa, LSA = Latin & South America*, EU = Europe, WP = Western Pacific, EM = Eastern Mediterranean; *We separated North America from Latin & South America for more transparent display of participant distribution.

Supplementary information

Supplementary information.

Supplementary Note which describes citiesRISE and lists the project team members of Making cities mental health-friendly for adolescents and young adults.

Reporting Summary

Rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Collins, P.Y., Sinha, M., Concepcion, T. et al. Making cities mental health friendly for adolescents and young adults. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-07005-4

Download citation

Received : 15 June 2022

Accepted : 15 December 2023

Published : 21 February 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-07005-4

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines . If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.

Quick links

  • Explore articles by subject
  • Guide to authors
  • Editorial policies

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

research paper on urban planning issues

February 20, 2024

Research Seminar February 27 – Zeyu Wang

Our winter quarter seminar series continues February 27, 12:30-1:30pm in Gould 440. This is an in-person seminar.

Utilizing Time Series Street View Imagery to Assess Visual Perceptual Quality in Urban Neighborhoods: A Case Study of New York City and Singapore

Discover an innovative method using time series street view imagery to evaluate urban neighborhoods’ visual quality. This approach, differing from traditional survey methods, employs deep learning on a decade-long dataset, analyzing six perception indicators in diverse geographies. Our case studies in Singapore and New York City public housing demonstrates that temporal imagery can effectively assess spatial equity and monitor the visual environmental qualities of neighborhoods over time, providing a new, comprehensive, and scalable workflow. It can help governments improve policies and make informed decisions on enhancing the design and living standards of urban residential areas. Join us to see how this cutting-edge technique is transforming urban analysis and policy development.

Related Paper:

Wang, Z., Ito, K., & Biljecki, F. (2024). Assessing the equity and evolution of urban visual perceptual quality with time series street view imagery. Cities, 145, 104704.  Available at ResearchGate .

Zeyu Wang is a PhD student in the interdisciplinary UDP program at the University of Washington. Holding a Bachelor of Science in Geography and a Master of Urban Planning (MUP), his academic pursuits are deeply rooted in understanding built environment and human mobility patterns, with a strong focus on urban data science. He is passionate about using advanced technologies and novel data to monitor and evaluate urban built environment, gaining insights into complex urban issues and call for social justice.

Recent Posts

  • Research Seminar February 27 – Zeyu Wang February 20, 2024
  • Research Seminar February 13 – Ekin Ugurel February 7, 2024
  • Spotlight on alumnus Junfeng Jiao December 1, 2023
  • Research Seminar November 14 – Karen Chen October 27, 2023
  • Research Seminar October 24 – Dylan Stevenson October 18, 2023

Recent Comments

  • February 2024
  • December 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • September 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020

Be boundless

Connect with us:.

© 2024 University of Washington | Seattle, WA

IMAGES

  1. (PDF) A Review Study on Urban Planning & Artificial Intelligence

    research paper on urban planning issues

  2. Rational Urban Planning: Problems and Prospects

    research paper on urban planning issues

  3. Research of Urban Planning and Design Based on 3D Visualization GIS

    research paper on urban planning issues

  4. (PDF) Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science Call

    research paper on urban planning issues

  5. Sample essay on urban planning

    research paper on urban planning issues

  6. Urban and Transit Planning: A Culmination of Selected Research Papers

    research paper on urban planning issues

VIDEO

  1. Housing and urbanization

COMMENTS

  1. Urban planning and quality of life: A review of pathways linking the built environment to subjective well-being

    Urban planning and quality of life: A review of pathways linking the built environment to subjective well-being In light of the rapid global urbanization, providing a better quality of life in cities is becoming an increasingly critical issue for urban planning.

  2. Urban design & urban planning: A critical analysis to the theoretical

    The paper hypophyses that the dilemma of urban design- urban planning relationship may have been the reason behind why several projects very often don't turn out the way they were intended to. Cities face huge challenges in terms of achieving a high quality of urban design product, which fulfills the urban design theory principles and objectives.

  3. Implementing urban resilience in urban planning: A comprehensive

    According to this purpose, this paper provides three literature reviews to explore and critically analyse the different approaches of resilience and the several definitions of urban resilience in academic and operative fields, to address the dimensions, multifaceted characteristics, and key factors to being evaluated within an urban resilience e...

  4. The COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts on cities and major lessons for urban

    Results show that, in terms of thematic focus, early research on the impacts of COVID-19 on cities is mainly related to four major themes, namely, (1) environmental quality, (2) socio-economic impacts, (3) management and governance, and (4) transportation and urban design.

  5. Rural issues in urban planning: current trends and reflections

    It stresses that the world is now 54% urban and projects that the urban share will continue to grow, and offers the Guidelines as 'an instrument to promote sound urban and territorial planning around the world, based on universally agreed principles' (UN-Habitat December 2015, 4).

  6. (PDF) Urban design & urban planning: A critical analysis to the

    ... Introduction "Urban Design" is a concept that functions in the design and university jargon, as well as in general public. The term was popularized in the 20 th century, but was the subject...

  7. Urban, Planning and Transport Research

    Urban, Planning and Transport Research is an open ... this section seeks to develop an in-depth understanding of how different social and political issues are connected to developing sustainable mobilities systems and how geographies are intertwined with these processes. The idea is to publish original research articles, review papers and ...

  8. urban planning Latest Research Papers

    urban planning Latest Research Papers | ScienceGate urban planning Recently Published Documents TOTAL DOCUMENTS 7522 (FIVE YEARS 2614) H-INDEX 64 (FIVE YEARS 12) Latest Documents Most Cited Documents Contributed Authors Related Sources Related Keywords A Smart Urbanism Management Platform

  9. Social equity in urban resilience planning

    Notably, critics of the urban resilience agenda argue that policies fail to adequately address social equity issues. This study seeks to inform these debates by providing a cross-sectional analysis of how issues of equity are incorporated into urban resilience planning. ... Journal of Planning Education and Research 36: 333-348. doi ...

  10. A Review of Urban Planning Research for Climate Change

    This paper identified the research focus and development tendency of urban planning and climate change research from 1990 to 2016 using CiteSpace, which is based on the Web of Science database. Through cluster analysis and a document sorting method, the research direction of city planning and climate change were mainly divided into four academic groupings, 15 clusters with homogenous themes ...

  11. Research Methods and the Planning Process

    Chapter 1 introduces the definition of research methods, and how they relate to the urban and regional planning process. Although there are different approaches to resolving planning issues or making a plan, the basic process of planning goes from problem definition, data collection, data analysis, to reporting findings and using the findings ...

  12. (PDF) Urban planning and sustainable cities

    Ahmed M Selim View Show abstract PDF | On Jan 1, 2019, Rosario Adapon Turvey published Urban planning and sustainable cities | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

  13. Exploring recent trends in integrating urban planning and ecology

    Urbanization has rapidly transformed the global landscape, and its impact on ecology and biodiversity has a critical concern for sustainable development. Integrating urban planning and ecology can help to address these impacts by promoting sustainable urban development and protecting the ecosystem. In this research, a systematic literature review is conducted to explore the integration of ...

  14. Urban and Transit Planning: A Culmination of Selected Research Papers

    A volume of five parts, this book is a culmination of selected research papers from the second version of the international conferences on Urban Planning & Architectural Design for sustainable Development (UPADSD) and Urban Transit and Sustainable Networks (UTSN) of 2017 in Palermo and the first of the Resilient and Responsible Architecture and Urbanism Conference (RRAU) of 2018 in the ...

  15. Selected Research Issues of Urban Public Health

    Urban planning and governance have great impact on the distribution of health-promoting resources and on accumulation of risks that affect health of different population groups [ 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17] and contribute to both communicable and non-communicable diseases [ 18 ].

  16. 382 questions with answers in URBAN PLANNING

    10 answers. Jul 11, 2022. The article " Ethnographic Knowledge in Urban Planning - Bridging the Gap between the Theories of Knowledge-Based and Communicative Planning ", that was published on ...

  17. Special Issue : Urban Planning and Economic Development

    This Special Issue will show research outcomes about urban planning policies and experiences as a result of the interaction between planning and economic development in a large sense, from a regional and metropolitan scope to small-scale urban projects for economic development. UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda highlights the role of sustainable ...

  18. Urban Planning

    Urban Planning (ISSN: 2183-7635) is an international, peer-reviewed open access journal of urban studies aimed at advancing understandings and ideas of humankind's habitats — villages, towns, cities, megacities — in order to promote progress and quality of life. Open Access: free to read and share, with an article processing charge for accepted papers to offset production costs (more ...

  19. Next Issues

    Submission of Full Papers: 15-30 April 2025. Publication of the Issue: January/March 2026. Information: The rise of the dynamic field known as Geogames has been due to the response of the urban planning domain, supported by digital technologies advances and participatory demands, to pressing contemporary urban issues.

  20. Urban Planning Research and Practice in China

    A large amount of research has examined board theories, mechanisms, processes, and outcomes of China's urbanization: a recent example is a special issue on People and Plans in Urbanising China in the journal of Urban Studies.

  21. Urban Planning Research Papers

    411,725 Followers Recent papers in Urban Planning Most Downloaded Papers Shaping the City of Tomorrow in East Asia: Concepts, Schemes and Ideas for Urban Development from 1960s to 2010, and Beyond

  22. Urban expansion: theory, evidence and practice

    Research and planning for urban expansion, ... This special issue on urban expansion contains eight articles covering a range of resear ch issues ... Reviewing historical planning papers, maps ...

  23. Study on demand and characteristics of parking system in urban areas: A

    Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 3 (1) (2003), pp. 65-86. Google Scholar. Kay and Smith, 2000. ... Journal of Urban Planning and Development, 117 (4) (1991), pp. 129-139. View in Scopus Google Scholar. ... She has published 15 research papers in reputed journals and conference proceedings in areas related to traffic and ...

  24. Making cities mental health friendly for adolescents and young adults

    Urban life shapes the mental health of city dwellers, and although cities provide access to health, education and economic gain, urban environments are often detrimental to mental health1,2.

  25. Research Seminar February 27

    It can help governments improve policies and make informed decisions on enhancing the design and living standards of urban residential areas. Join us to see how this cutting-edge technique is transforming urban analysis and policy development. Related Paper: Wang, Z., Ito, K., & Biljecki, F. (2024).

  26. Remote Sensing

    Urban biodiversity and ecosystem services depend on the quality, quantity, and connectivity of urban green areas (UGAs), which are crucial for enhancing urban livability and resilience. However, assessing these connectivity metrics in urban landscapes often suffers from outdated land cover classifications and insufficient spatial resolution. Spectral data from Earth Observation, though ...