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Numerous studies have found that jobs, amenities, and location influence housing prices in urban areas. However, there is still a lack of in-depth understanding of the impacts of these factors on various housing submarkets within a city. With the case study of Xiamen, this paper investigates the impacts of jobs, amenities, and location on four housing submarkets, classified by owner-occupied and rental housing, in inner and outer districts. The hedonic model, Chow test, and Tiao-Goldberger test are applied to analyze differentiation in the determinants of housing prices between four submarkets. The results show that all submarkets are influenced by blue-collar jobs (which have negative effects) and seascape (which has a positive impact). Besides, differentiated after submarkets show that school districts and public transportation have a greater influence on owner-occupied markets than on rental markets. A heterogeneity exists between inner-district and outer-district markets. For instance, bus rapid transit (BRT) has a positive effect on housing and rental prices in the outer districts but not in the inner districts. These differences are mainly caused by the disparities of spatial quality, economic development, and public facilities and amenities. The findings have profound implications for decision-making and planning practices.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies, as new forms of planning support systems (PSSs), are becoming increasingly vital to planning. However, there is a lack of empirical research on factors influencing VR’s supportive role from a user perspective, thus producing barriers to VR’s advancement in planning practices. This neglect motivates the focus of this study, in which we adapt relevant PSS theory to build a conceptual framework that examines factors influencing VR performance in an experience-based environment. Empirical data are gathered predominantly through students’ experiences with and evaluation of the “Viewing the Western Hills at Yinding Bridge” ( Yinding Guanshan) VR Project—a VR system developed to optimize the view corridor of Beijing’s Western Hills. The results show large variability in factors influencing VR performance. In general, the effects of six factors are significant, including 3D visualization, simulating real-world scenes, user-friendliness, interactivity, inspiring participants’ enthusiasm, and inspiring creative thinking. These factors are attributed to the functionality, usability and innovativeness dimensions of VR systems. This study concludes that to realize the supportive and useful role of VR in planning, at minimum, these six factors should be explicitly taken into account.

Climate change will affect the way cities work substantially. Flooding and urban heating are among the most tangible consequences in cities around the globe. Extreme hydro-meteorological events will likely increase in the future due to climate change. Making cities climate-resilient is therefore an urgent challenge to sustain urban living. To adapt cities to the consequences of climate change, new ideas and concepts need to be adopted. This oftentimes requires action from different stakeholder groups and citizens. In other words, climate adaptation of cities needs governance. Facilitating such urban governance for climate adaptation is thus a big and increasing challenge of urban planning. Smart tools and its embedding in smart urban governance is promising to help in this respect. To what extent can the use of digital knowledge technologies in a collaborative planning setting be instrumental in facilitating climate adaptation? This question entails visualising effects of climate adaptation interventions and facilitating dialogue between governments, businesses such as engineering companies, and citizens. The aim of this thematic issue is to explore how the application of technologies in urban planning, embedded in smart urban governance, can contribute to provide climate change adaptation. We understand smart urban governance in this context both in terms of disclosing technical expert information to the wider public, and in terms of supporting with the help of technologies the wider governance debates between the stakeholders involved. The contributions reflect this dual focus on socio-technical innovations and planning support, and therefore include various dimensions, from modelling and interacting to new modes of urban governance and political dimensions of using technologies in climate change adaptation in urban areas.

Over the past decade, the dominant entrepreneurial form of urban governance has seriously hindered the transformation of cities by neglecting the role of urban contexts in shaping governance structures and outcomes. To promote alternatives, this article presents a sociotechnical framework for smart urban governance. This framework explicitly examines the impacts of urban contexts on the sociotechnical interaction between urban technological innovation and urban governance in the realm of smart cities. Three real-world cases were used to demonstrate how the framework can be applied in different urban contexts. The results show that the alleged smartness in smart urban governance by no means implies the simple acceptance, adoption, and use of technology; instead, it needs to be conditionate. For successful smart urban governance, urban technological innovation should be effectively attuned to the wider urban actors and preexisting urban challenges (i.e., the urban governance process), with a special focus on the urban context.

Over the past decade, two dominant perspectives prevail on the governance of smart cities. From a public administration perspective, ‘smart governance’ emphasizes the importance of technology-based tools in transforming government institutions. From an urban planning perspective, the governance of smart cities focuses on the institution interaction with spatial challenges. Within this backdrop, these perspectives can learn from each other to arrive at new transformative smart governance approaches. This paper proposes a specific urban planning perspective on smart governance, labeled as ‘smart urban governance’. It is aiming specifically at the transformative governance of the socio-spatial context of urban challenges associated to smart cities via technological innovations and opening up new possibilities for city transformation. To this end, the meaning of smart urban governance is conceptualized from three dimensions: purposes, components and contexts. Based on a systematic literature review, these three dimensions are integrated into one holistic framework. A case illustration was applied to demonstrate the use and advantages of this framework. From this, this paper concludes that smart urban governance, by explicitly taking into account the specific socio-spatial context, can improve our understanding of the urban challenges associated to smart cities and contribute to its appropriate and ‘smart’ governance.

The world is on the cusp of advancing to a sixth wave of technologically based innovation, which will significantly impact our rapidly-growing urban environments. However, political and social resistance hold us back from the transformational potential of technological innovation, to empower both urban decision-makers and citizens to make informed choices about their urban futures. This volume brings together a collection of chapters that encapsulates the state-of the-art research in data driven methods for harnessing the potential of computational planning and management for smart cities. The scholarly works are organised around three thematic lenses: (I) smart cities and their data and governance; (II) computational planning of smart cities; and (III) mobility and transportation modelling . Each chapter addresses the potential of technologically based innovation in urban environments and provides innovative methods and a series of research findings to guide cities in harnessing its potential. This volume provides an important contribution to the body of knowledge interfacing data, technology and smart cities as we strive to plan more liveable, sustainable and productive cities of the future. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Smart governance has been increasingly gaining momentum to deal with the challenges of fast urbanization in China. However, only limited English literature is available to enhance our understanding of Chinese smart governance. In this chapter, special emphasis is put on our transformative understanding of smart governance in China by identifying the impacts of urban context on smart governance arrangements from an urban planning perspective. As such, we concentrate on smart governance projects in different Chinese cities, foremost based on Chinese literature. We aim to investigate: (1) what smart governance means in Chinese urban planning settings, and (2) how urban context influences the smart governance projects in different Chinese cities. On the basis of an intensive review of Chinese literature on smart governance, we find that smart governance in China varies significantly. Therein, we can identify four types of smart governance in China, including: (1) constructing a pilot area, (2) improving government performance, (3) building trust in government, and (4) encouraging innovation. A comparative exploration of four Chinese projects representing these four types of smart governance shows that the urban context affects the interaction between technology and urban actors. Moreover, it shows that this interaction has a feedback effect on the urban context itself. From this we can conclude that knowledge on the urban context is vital to understand the expected outcomes of intended smart governance arrangements.

In recent years, the widespread use of social media has generated new and big datasets and provided new platforms for urban planning. However, existing studies have often been case-specific or focused on a specific planning domain, leaving the role of social media in urban planning generally questioned. This study conducts a systematic review of to which extent social media can be used in urban planning. There are two main findings. On the one hand, social media data have been increasingly used for urban analysis and modelling, often combined with conventional and new datasets. The domains of application include individual activity patterns, urban land use, transportation behavior, and landscape. On the other hand, social media have provided a new platform for participation, communication and collaboration. They provide new opportunities for cities to hear the voices of distinctive social groups, even those who do not formally participate in planning processes. In recent years, citizens have used social media to initiate and organize themselves collective actions in planning practices. Issues of using social media data in urban planning include population and spatial biases, privacy issues, and difficulties in extracting useful information out of the social media data. It is necessary to pay more attention to the proper dealing with these issues during the collection and methodological handling of social media data.

Whether environmental values are helpful to stimulate people’s pro-environmental behaviour is a debatable issue, in particular when it comes to purchasing green dwellings. This article employs the means-end theory to explore whether environmental values matter in green home-buying in Nanjing China. It systematically compares two groups of home-buyers. The target group bought a green apartment and the control group a conventional one. We investigated the differences between these two groups in the relative importance and underlying personal values of six green attributes: energy and water efficiency, thermal and sound insulation, ventilation and non-toxic construction materials. Results show that not only conventional but also green residents have limited environmental values, and that health and comfort are the important values driving consumers’ green choices. Raising environmental values might be less effective than expected to persuade consumers to buy green apartments. Policy makers might consider stressing health and comfort of green apartments to up-scale green construction.

Economic restructuring and the dramatic expansion of higher education have generated large migration flows of skilled employees to Chinese cities. The residential mobility of skilled migrants has a large impact on the operation of housing and labour markets and the (re)production of social inequities. In this paper we examine the effects of life-course trajectories and institutional factors on the residential mobility of skilled migrants, in comparison with local skilled workers in Nanjing, using a retrospective survey conducted in 2012. Results show that skilled migrants have a higher level of residential mobility than their local counterparts, and that this difference arises from the locals’ early entry into homeownership. Yet, migrants and locals also share similarities: market factors that are closely related to household, labour, and housing careers are decisive in explaining the residential mobility of skilled workers, indicating that life-course theories are also applicable in the Chinese context. The impacts of traditional institutional factors, such as hukou , employer type, and Chinese Communist Party membership, are of a much smaller magnitude, indicating that markets have become dominant institutions in China. Keywords: residential mobility, skilled migrants, Nanjing

Planning Support Systems (PSS) are geo-information based tools to support planning. Since the term PSS appeared for the first time in the late 1980s it has evolved into a serious academic subfield. In this debate, little systematic attention has been paid to the added value of PSS for planning practice. In particular the perspective of users requires more empirical attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by answering the question: What is the practitioner’s perception of the added value of PSS? In doing so we first develop a conceptual framework including the most important added values of PSS observed in the literature. Next, we describe an empirical study of the MapTable PSS, a support tool that is relatively frequently used in the Netherlands. Fifteen interviews were conducted and a Group Decision Room workshop was organized in order to systematically gather perceptions of users about the added value of this PSS. Added values that particularly emphasized are improved collaboration and communication among stakeholders, something which resonates with recent trends in planning. The added value of a better informed outcome is, somewhat surprisingly, considered less important. In order to deepen our understanding, we recommend more research in different contexts and with different tools.

Planning is both an interdisciplinary and a collaborative endeavour. A range of disciplines are involved in planning, which arguably all have a specific frame through which they perceive reality and address planning issues. Three main disciplinary frames can be discerned: analytical, design and negotiation. Within this context, increasing usage is made of planning support systems (PSS), which are integrated sets of tools, often digital, aiming to support different tasks in the planning process. PSS arguably have the potential to support the planning process by facilitating interdisciplinary learning processes, involving “frame reflection” by different disciplinary actors. This paper studies this assumption through two case studies in which a PSS was applied in an interdisciplinary setting. It was found that “frame reflection” (double-loop learning) occurred in only one of the two case studies -and that this involved several frictions between disciplines. In the other case study more practical forms of lea...

Radical economic restructuring has resulted in a large flow of skilled migrants into ever-expanding Chinese cities in the past decade. Dreaming of owning a home in the destination city, skilled migrants compete with locals on the housing market. It is important to know how and when people acquire their home and, by the same token, what prevents others from doing so. Based on the life histories of 804 skilled workers in Nanjing and employing event-history analysis, this paper examines the differences in the timing of entry into homeownership between skilled migrants and their local counterparts and identifies the factors in parallel life course careers that contribute to these differences. Results show a delayed but accelerated increase in the homeownership rate for skilled migrants, indicating an assimilation process. Migrants' later entry into homeownership can be attributed foremost to the limited intergenerational transmission of wealth, while restricted knowledge about the local housing market and later partnership also play a role. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the timing of entry into homeownership is largely determined by the availability of financial resources and progression in the life course rather than institutional factors.