With our plurithematic issues we intend to draw the attention of researchers, policy-makers, scientists and the general public to some of the topics of highest relevance. Scholars interested in editing a themed issue of Urban Planning are encouraged to contact the Editorial Office of the journal (up@cogitatiopress.com).
Published Themed Issues
Published issues are available here.
Upcoming Issues
- Vol 2, Issue 3: Social Ecology of Sustainability
- Vol 2, Issue 3: Smart Solutions for Sustainable Cities
- Vol 2, Issue 4: Garden Cities and the Suburban Antidotes
- Vol 3, Issue 1: Crowdsourced Data and Social Media in Participatory Urban Planning
- Vol 3, Issue 2: Urban Planning to Enable a 1.5°C Scenario
- Vol 3, Issue 2: Urban Planning and the Spatial Ideas of Henri Lefebvre
Volume 2, Issue 3
Title: Social Ecology of Sustainability
Editors: Stephen Wheeler (University of California - Davis, USA), Christina Rosan (Temple University, USA) and Bjoern Hagen (Arizona State University, USA)
Deadline for Full Papers: 30 April 2017
Issue Release: September 2017
Information: What has led some places to be more successful than others at implementing sustainability policies and programs? What can be learned from those examples that will help other cities, regions, states, or nations find similar success? This issue of Urban Planning will explore factors that have promoted sustainability success within large and small jurisdictions worldwide. Authors may consider institutional, political, social, cultural, demographic, economic, technological and/or geographical forces leading to successful implementation of policies and programs, and hopefully will communicate to readers how these factors have evolved over time and what other jurisdictions might learn from them.
Each submission should contain the following:
1) Evidence that the jurisdiction in question has succeeded in moving toward one or more dimensions of sustainability;
2) Evidence that some factors or constellation of factors has played a role in such success;
3) A discussion of underlying hypotheses and theory that would explain this causal connection; and
4) A discussion of how the experience of this jurisdiction might have implications for similar jurisdictions elsewhere.
A variety of research methods may be appropriate for this topic, including case study analysis, comparative case studies, interviews, surveys, and either qualitative or quantitative analysis.
Authors are encouraged to develop specific recommendations on improving the context for sustainability planning in other jurisdictions.
Instructions for Authors: Authors interested in submitting a paper to this issue shall carefully read the Instructions for Authors and submit their full papers through the journal's online submission system by 30 April 2017. Authors are also highly encouraged to send an abstract to up@cogitatiopress.com for a first assessment of the submission.
Open Access: This journal has an article processing charge to cover its costs, so authors are advised to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication fees, and if their institutions wish to join Cogitatio’s Membership Program (institutional members enable their authors to publish without having to incur any publication fees). Further information about the journal’s open access charges and institutional members can be found here.
Volume 2, Issue 3
Title: Smart Solutions for Sustainable Cities
Editors: Tom Sanchez (Virginia Tech, USA), Ralph Hall (Virginia Tech, USA) and Nader Afzalan (Redlands University, USA)
Deadline for Abstracts: 31 March 2017
Deadline for Full Papers: 30 April 2017
Issue Release: September 2017
Information: Globally, cities and urban places are adapting to social, economic, technological, and environmental changes. At the same time, we hear terms such as “smart” and “sustainable”, which are popular but amorphous. This is especially the case at the intersection of smart and sustainable urban pursuits. So what does it mean for a city to be “smart” and what does it mean for a city to be “sustainable”? Definitions will likely vary among researchers and among disciplines. This is also likely due to the regional, economic, and demographic context of urban landscapes across the globe. This issue explores smart and sustainable cities to help us understand these concepts, and delve into how particular aspects of future cities will be reflected in new and different settlement patterns. The issue highlights current research and speculates about anticipated changes that will transform urban life.
Topics to be addressed in this issue include, but are not limited to planning paradigms and urban research/technology applications focused on promoting economic, social and environmental well-being related to:
- Water, energy and other resources’ efficient use
- Green building and waste management
- Food systems in urban areas
- Healthy cities and walkability
- Environmentally friendly and socially inclusive transportation
- Economic development
- Social equity and community resilience
Instructions for Authors: Authors interested in submitting a paper to this issue shall carefully read the Instructions for Authors and submit their full papers through the journal's online submission system by 30 April 2017. Authors are also highly encouraged to send, by 31 March 2017, an abstract to up@cogitatiopress.com for a first assessment of the submission.
Open Access: This journal has an article processing charge to cover its costs, so authors are advised to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication fees, and if their institutions wish to join Cogitatio’s Membership Program (institutional members enable their authors to publish without having to incur any publication fees). Further information about the journal’s open access charges and institutional members can be found here.
Volume 2, Issue 4
Title: Garden Cities and the Suburban Antidotes
Editors: Geoffrey Caruso and Markus Hesse (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)
Deadline for Full Papers: 14 July 2017
Issue Release: December 2017
Information: Urban population is definitely increasing worldwide and what is known as “urban sprawl” in particular has been largely depicted as a problematic and unsustainable form of urban development. Compact city principles have been presented as perfect antidotes and became the flagship of urban policy over the last 15 years in many Western countries. Increasingly, however, it becomes obvious that too simplistic density policies have been trapped in many difficulties, e.g. low level of acceptance, gentrification and segregation, health and pollution exposure impacts, limited impact on the increasingly complex mobility patterns, mismatch of location, buildings and neighbourhood qualities to lifecycles and new family organizations, difficulties to adapt building stocks to innovative energy infrastructure, urban infill with halo effects on biodiversity corridors, etc. Those traps reflect a still limited understanding of the functioning of suburbs and of the complexity of suburbanization processes.
Rather than equating suburbs to sprawl, this selection of papers considers suburbs as an in-between space—between the city and the countryside, between urban and suburban politics—whose sheer existence and broad distribution across the world calls for transformation towards more sustainable forms of development.
This themed issue is committed to delivering new and profound knowledge about suburbs, and the individuals, institutions, forms and infrastructure therein. It foresees papers that will use diverse but highly complementary approaches, theoretical or empirical, quantitative or qualitative, all embedded within international research literature and academic community. Particularly, we seek to explore two different axes of knowledge:
- Firstly, we present recent analytical insights into the state of city-regional and suburban problems and developments, such as land use, health, transport and urbanization
- Secondly, we investigate the practice of planning for and in suburbia, with a particular—even though not exclusive—focus on initiatives that stress the political in-betweenness or the urban-countryside interfacing, such as the British Garden Cities-initiative (TCPA) or the Gartenstadt21-research (BBSR) in Germany and others.
Instructions for Authors: Authors interested in submitting a paper to this issue shall carefully read the Instructions for Authors and submit their full papers through the journal's online submission system by 14 July 2017. Authors are also highly encouraged to send, as early as possible, an abstract to up@cogitatiopress.com for a first assessment of the submission.
Open Access: This journal has an article processing charge to cover its costs, so authors are advised to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication fees, and if their institutions wish to join Cogitatio’s Membership Program (institutional members enable their authors to publish without having to incur any publication fees). Further information about the journal’s open access charges and institutional members can be found here.
Volume 3, Issue 1
Title: Crowdsourced Data and Social Media in Participatory Urban Planning
Editors: Bernd Resch (University of Salzburg, Austria; bernd.resch@sbg.ac.at), Peter Zeile (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany; peter.zeile@kit.edu) and Ourania Kounadi (University of Salzburg, Austria; ourania.kounadi@sbg.ac.at)
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 September 2017
Deadline for Full Papers: 15 November 2017
Issue Release: March 2018
Information: Recent technological advances in the context of Web 2.0 developments like social media, smartphones, wearables, etc. have generated an increased demand for citizen involvement into planning processes and the formation of civic participation initiatives. This development has sparked research in the area of citizen-centric planning, making use of social technologies and applications. These neo-democratic developments are increasingly producing a vast amount and wide variety of user-generated data. The availability of these new and large datasets effectively necessitates new data science methods for analysing and visualising user-generated data, and for integrating citizens’ opinions into planning processes. This particularly calls for interdisciplinary approaches between urban planners, geoinformatics professionals, sociologists, computer scientists, environmental scientists, and others.
The overarching objective of this special issue is to foster a deeper understanding of urban processes from user-generated data to improve citizen-centric urban planning, addressing a wide number of application areas such as quality of life, traffic and transportation planning, sustainable tourism or public safety. We particularly encourage the submission of contributions in the following research fields:
- Participatory planning
- Understanding urban processes from user-generated data
- Community-based planning
- Self-organisation and self-sustained neighbourhoods
- Quality of life
- Crowdsourcing
- Open Street Map (OSM) and other VGI/CGI platforms
- Social media: analysis, communication and participation, visualisation
- Participatory and human sensing
- Human sensing using wearables
- Participatory sensing to integrate subjective data into planning processes
- Implications of data quality and analysis processes
- Data quality: uncertainty, sample sizes, data types, limitations, and ambiguity in information extraction
- Spatial analysis of urban emotions and behaviour
- Scale specifications for the needs of urban planning
- Field studies and real-world examples: participatory planning in practice
- Planners’ perspectives and demands w.r.t. geospatial analysis
- Augmented and Virtual Reality in urban planning
- Bridging urban science and urban planning
Instructions for Authors: Authors interested in submitting a paper to this issue shall carefully read the Instructions for Authors and submit their full papers through the journal's online submission system by 15 November 2017. Authors are also highly encouraged to send, by 30 September 2017, an abstract to up@cogitatiopress.com for a first assessment of the submission.
Open Access: This journal has an article processing charge to cover its costs, so authors are advised to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication fees, and if their institutions wish to join Cogitatio’s Membership Program (institutional members enable their authors to publish without having to incur any publication fees). Further information about the journal’s open access charges and institutional members can be found here.
Volume 3, Issue 2
Title: Urban Planning to Enable a 1.5°C Scenario
Editors: Peter Newman (Curtin University and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and Aromar Revi (Indian Institute for Human Settlements and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
Deadline for Abstracts: 15 October 2017
Deadline for Full Papers: 30 November 2017
Issue Release: April 2018
Information: The Paris Agreement is a challenge for all cities to adapt how they will plan for a world with no fossil fuels. However, there is powerful evidence from climate scientists that we must go beyond this agreement if we are to prevent galloping climate change impacts. They are suggesting a limit of global temperature rise to 1.5°C by 2040. Such a scenario will require dramatic change that may already be underway but needs good frameworks of planning to be enabled. How will cities help create a 1.5°C world? What will emerging cities have to do differently? Can the 1.5°C limit be achieved whilst reaching the Sustainable Development Goals? How critical is the role of urban planning in achieving such transformation?
This issue aims to build on the literature on Cities and Climate Change contained in the Fifth Assessment Report and to produce relevant contributions for the 2018 IPCC Special Report, Global Warming of 1.5°C. The report focuses on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related GHG emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
Instructions for Authors: Authors interested in submitting a paper to this issue shall carefully read the Instructions for Authors and submit their full papers through the journal's online submission system by 30 November 2017. Authors are also highly encouraged to send, by 15 October 2017, an abstract to up@cogitatiopress.com for a first assessment of the submission.
Open Access: This journal has an article processing charge to cover its costs, so authors are advised to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication fees, and if their institutions wish to join Cogitatio’s Membership Program (institutional members enable their authors to publish without having to incur any publication fees). Further information about the journal’s open access charges and institutional members can be found here.
Volume 3, Issue 2
Title: Urban Planning and the Spatial Ideas of Henri Lefebvre
Editor: Michael E Leary-Owhin (London South Bank University, UK)
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 September 2017
Deadline for Full Papers: 15 January 2018
Issue Release: June 2018
Urban planning has an intense concern with ‘urban space’ (including ‘rural space’). Spatial planning evolved as a concept in attempts to integrate the complex social, economic, environmental and political aspects of late 20th century society. Similarly, the spatial ideas of the (neo)Marxist philosopher/sociologist Henri Lefebvre encompass these issues but also stress the importance of culture and history. This special issue of Urban Planning is predicated on three of Lefebvre’s major works:
- The Production of Space (1974/1991)
- Critique of Everyday Life (1981/1991)
- The Urban Revolution (1970/2003)
It draws to a lesser extent on two other texts: Rhythmanalysis (published posthumously in 1992) and Introduction to Modernity (1962/1995). Lefebvre’s ideas and approach to the investigation of cities and urban society have been taken up most vigorously in the fields of human geography and sociology and latterly architecture. Despite this, it is clear that Lefebvre’s five central concepts: abstract space, the spatial triad, everyday life, the right to the city and planetary urbanism provide powerful tools for the examination of urban planning, cities and urban society in the Global North and South. Urban planning first embraced Lefebvre’s ideas in the 1990s. Surprisingly then, it is only in the last ten years or so that Lefebvrian inspired research, across several aspects of urban planning has become widely accepted but is still emerging.
This special issue of Urban Planning seeks to contribute to and extend the debate regarding the application of Lefebvre’s ideas to the current challenges and opportunities of urban planning. Papers can cover a range of issues e.g.: governance, urban design, urban regeneration, environmental management, community participation, housing, policy making and evaluation, local/strategic planning, infrastructure, international planning, neoliberal urbanism, smart cities, land hunger, urbanisation, gentrification, urban poverty/inequality, the right to the city, new towns/cities, planning history, city management and the law. We welcome papers that present: new empirical research, critical reviews of current issues, theoretical discussions and developments and demonstrate a critical engagement with Lefebvre’s ideas and arguments.
Instructions for Authors: Authors interested in submitting a paper to this issue shall carefully read the Instructions for Authors and submit their full papers through the journal's online submission system by 15 January 2018. Authors are also highly encouraged to send, as early as possible, an abstract to up@cogitatiopress.com for a first assessment of the submission.
Open Access: This journal has an article processing charge to cover its costs, so authors are advised to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication fees, and if their institutions wish to join Cogitatio’s Membership Program (institutional members enable their authors to publish without having to incur any publication fees). Further information about the journal’s open access charges and institutional members can be found here.
♦♦♦