Rapid urbanization has brought environmentally, socially, and economically great challenges to cities and societies. To build a sustainable city, these challenges need to be faced efficiently and successfully. This paper focuses on the environmental issues and investigates the ecological approaches for planning sustainable cities through a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. The re...

Cities worldwide have been trying to achieve a sustainable urban form to handle their rapid urban growth. Many sustainable urban forms have been studied and two of them, the compact city and the eco city, were chosen in this study as urban form foundations. Based on these forms, four sustainable city criteria (compactness, compatibility, dependency, and suitability) were considered as necessary...

Urban renewal and sustainable development are two popular issues in both policy agenda and academia. Although their importance has been increasingly recognized, an integrated review covering sustainability, planning, and urban renewal has yet to be produced. Based on 81 journal papers, this paper presents a critical review of recent studies on sustainable urban renewal over the period 1990 to 2...

Introduction Common practices in current urban logistics planning in Scandinavia and the UK, and the degree to which SUTP (Sustainable Urban Transport Plan), SUMP (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans) and SULP (Sustainable Urban Logistics Plans) guidelines are used, are examined in this paper. Methods A systematic literature review identifies relevant studies based on predefined inclusion criteria...

In recent years, there has been rapid urbanization worldwide, resulting in both benefits and problems. Sustainable urbanization has become an important aspect in promoting sustainable development. Existing studies have introduced various methodologies to guide urbanization towards sustainable practices. The application of these methods has contributed to improving urban sustainability. To furth...

UD Co-Spaces (Urban Design Collaborative Spaces) is an integrated, tabletop-centered multi-display environment for engaging the public in the complex process of collaborative urban design. We describe the iterative user-centered process that we followed over six years through a close interdisciplinary collaboration involving experts in urban design and neighbourhood planning. Versions of UD Co-...

Since the start of the 21st century, humanity has been a predominantly urban species. This Special Issue is about the future of cities and how urbanization will develop when based on principles of sustainability. It explores the underlying dimensions of the transformation of existing cities and the design of low carbon green precincts and their urban systems. The view of the papers presented in...

Sustainable development is a key component in urban studies. Earth Observation (EO) can play a valuable role in sustainable urban development and planning, since it represents a powerful data source with the potential to provide a number of relevant urban sustainability indicators. To this end, in this paper we propose a conceptual list of EO-based indicators capable of supporting urban plannin...

Incisive interpretations of urban-forest sustainability are important in furthering our understanding of how to sustain the myriad values associated with urban forests. Our analysis of earlier interpretations reveals conceptual gaps. These interpretations are attached to restrictive definitions of a sustainable urban forest and limited to a rather mechanical view of maintaining the biophysical ...