Abstracts Submission

Nowadays, urban transformations are occurring in a context of intensifying climate change, growing socio-spatial inequality, and rapid digitisation of urban systems. Urban form—understood as the spatial configuration of networks, densities, fabrics, and built typologies—reflects critical data regarding climate exposure, social vulnerability, and the adaptive capacity of cities. However, planning instruments often remain grounded in fragmented data, segmented methods, and models that fail to adequately address spatial justice. This thematic issue proposes to explore new theoretical approaches, analytical methodologies, and emerging data sources that contribute to more informed, inclusive, and fair planning decisions. Contributions that integrate urban morphology, spatial data science, artificial intelligence, multiscale analysis, urban climate models, space syntax, digital twins, digital citizen participation, and socio-environmental vulnerability indicators are particularly welcome. This issue aims to bring together research linking urban form and climate performance (such as urban heat islands, heatwaves, and flood risk), as well as studies examining how different morphological patterns influence equity in access to green infrastructure, sustainable mobility, and urban services. Comparative approaches between the Global North and South, hybrid quantitative-qualitative methodologies, and studies aimed at transferring knowledge to public policy are highly valued. By promoting interdisciplinary dialogue among urban planning, geography, architecture, data science, and climate studies, this thematic issue aims to advance a planning paradigm grounded in robust evidence, methodological innovation, and an explicit commitment to spatial justice and the climate transition.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Urban Planning is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.

While questions of urban inequality have long constituted a topic of inquiry for the social sciences, the picture is more ambiguous when it comes to the applied spatial sciences and policy-making concerned with urban development. Questions of access to housing, social services, and infrastructure are certainly of key concern in disciplines such as architecture and planning, both in research as well as in practice. The same is true for new forms of environmental inequalities: As the effects of climate change, such as droughts, heat waves, and flooding, are increasingly felt in cities around the world, it has also become clear that the effects on cities are unequally distributed, particularly affecting urban populations that are the most vulnerable and least affluent.

Many cities take measures to tackle these interrelated ecological and social challenges when adapting urban spaces to new realities, reducing the impact of environmental hazards and extreme weather events, and implementing future-oriented strategies. Yet, whether and how forms of inequality are considered, reflected on, and actively approached in such measures and strategies of urban future-making remains open to discussion.

Contributions to this thematic issue should examine, from different angles, the capacity of social actors and institutions in urban development to address current dynamics of urban inequality. In particular, we urge authors to deal with the question of how policy instruments, planning strategies, and urban design solutions consider implicit or explicit challenges of inequality. The focus should be on professionals in built environment disciplines as social actors in various roles in the state administration, private sector, non-profit sector, and civil society initiatives, as well as on institutions in related fields of action in urban development policy and planning.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Urban Planning is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 100 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.