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The UNESCO label of World Heritage can attract a high number of tourists to heritage properties for their Outstanding Universal Values (OUV). Although international studies have demonstrated the World Heritage system can contribute to stimulating cultural tourism and boosting the local economy, how this heritage-led development process promotes urban conservation and morphological changes in cities is yet to be explored adequately. This paper aims to explore the urban morphology of a historic Chinese city after its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List, taking the Old Town of Lijiang as case. The methods of spatial plan analysis and discourse analysis are used to analyse the data. The research findings have demonstrated that, theoretically, the Conzenian approach of urban morphology can be an effective framework for World Heritage OUV-monitoring. Methodologically, the analysis of spatial plans and multi-stakeholder interviews can reveal local urban morphology from macro to micro levels. Case-specifically in Lijiang, urban physical characteristics and building structures have been well maintained while traditional social fabric and neighbourhood networks have almost vanished. This research has incorporated the urban morphology approach into (world) heritage management in China, as well as worldwide, in order to maintain the balance between urban conservation and economic growth.

One of the under-represented groups in participatory urban research is very young children (0–3 years old). Very young children from disadvantaged neighbourhoods, particularly in global cities, such as Istanbul, often have to negotiate unfriendly urban spaces in their daily routines. These routines consist of intertwined events of caregivers and children, as care duties of caregivers frame their joint daily lives. Based on questionnaires and participatory mapping with full-time mothers from Istanbul, we argue that a compact design of neighbourhoods, which merges public spaces relevant to families with young children in combined destinations, is critical towards creating inclusive urban environments.

The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage can contribute to sustainable development and circular economy, preventing waste production and resource depletion by extending the heritage lifespan. This reuse is limited by challenges mostly identified at the case study level. However, further theorising these challenges could enrich the related body of knowledge and contribute to their mitigation. By defining a theoretical framework, this research builds on the cross-sectional analysis of adaptive reuse undertaken in three European cities: Amsterdam, Rijeka, and Salerno. The challenges were identified by representatives of the public, private, knowledge, and non-profit sectors through stakeholder engagement workshops. Examples of challenges common to the three cities are shortcomings in existing approaches; lack of awareness and capacity; cultural heritage interpretation and management; data management; costs; conflicting interests; lack of knowledge; lack of participatory processes; and compliance with regulations and policies. Being identified in diverse European cities, these challenges can be representative within the European region. Arguably, some of these challenges also apply to other regions since they were reported in case studies from Asia, North America, and Oceania. Addressing these challenges could contribute to sustainable development by potentially contributing towards efforts to achieve ten of the Sustainable Development Goals, as some challenges align with some of these goals.

There has been a growing interest in understanding the interdependencies between urbanisation and mental health. Although transportation in cities is complex and of foremost importance to support the mobility of goods and passengers, little is known about how it relates to individual psychological distress. This review aims to provide an up-to-date synthesis of research evidence about the influence of transport infrastructure and operational performance (congestion, delays and reliability) on mental health/wellbeing. It is structured around three main interacting concepts that determined the search/selection of articles: identification of the above-mentioned transport-related exposures; use of psychological and physiological validated instruments; and the outcome on mental health/wellbeing. Ultimately, 69 studies were identified involving an empirical quantitative focus that met the inclusion criteria. We summarise the instruments most reported in these studies and the findings linking transport indicators and psychological and physiological outcomes. Across the review, we identified evidence of the contribution of key transport infrastructure, congestion and delay indicators on negative affective states and psychophysiological distress. Regarding transport reliability, the scarce number of studies identified did not allow for drawing similar firm conclusions. We conclude by discussing some limitations and providing recommendations for future research and policy-making agendas.

The concept of community design has evolved with the advancement of technology. City information models (CIM), urban digital twin (UDT), and the proliferation of communication technologies have transformed the way society operates and has led to the modernisation of traditional methods of inclusive decision-makings. However, creating a CIM that effectively aligns the diverse interests and capabilities of (non-expert) users like local inhabitants for active participation can be challenging. In this study, we aim to develop a virtual CIM and explore the immersive behaviours of (non-expert) users in the context of community design and policy decision-making. To do this, we use a combination of multi-objective programming and mixed-media prototyping to create the CIM, which includes LOD 300 spatial representation, what-if scenario implementation, geo-tagging feedback, and easy communication and exploration by stakeholders. The virtual CIM was tested in a real-life urban community design exercise in The Netherlands, the Blue Zone Malvalaan, in two phases by both expert and non-expert stakeholders. We evaluated the user experience through quantitative and qualitative data analysis, focusing on ease-of-use, usefulness, immersion, mental and physical comfort, and satisfaction. Our research shows how the virtual CIM can help local stakeholders contribute to community design optimisation and strengthen policy decision-making outcomes.

There has been a growing interest in land value capture as a means of funding investments in transport infrastructure (TI), as reported in a vast literature analyzing the relationship between property values and accessibility provided by TI in general and transit specifically. There has, however, been limited research on the role of network-level regional transport accessibility and the intra-regional spatial heterogeneity of the price effects. Furthermore, studies usually focus on one transport mode, disregarding the multi-modal competition, and are mostly (pooled) cross-sectional analyses which do not reflect the dynamic nature of developments in TI and housing markets. To address these gaps, this paper empirically investigates the roles of local and regional transport accessibility by car and transit on the evolution of sales prices of single-family homes from 2001 to 2016, across different geographical contexts while controlling for various determinants in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). The spatial panel models’ results confirm that regional transport accessibility does indeed play a significant role in property values over and above the local proximity to TI, with variations between transit and car and over the spectrum of low–high density areas, which needs to be accounted for in land value capture policies.

High-speed railway (HSR) station areas are expected to benefit urban environments, not simply as transportation or economic hubs but also as urban places contributing to living quality. However, the relationship between HSR and place quality has not received systematic attention, despite the evolution of urban planning paradigms toward a clearer focus on quality of life. We have reviewed 44 academic articles written between 1996 and 2019 and analyzed concepts of place quality spanning the disciplines of urban design, urban planning, and urban economics. We identified three dimensions commonly associated with quality of place: a spatial dimension associated with aesthetic qualities of urban spaces; a socio-cultural dimension associated with experienced “sense of place”; and an economic dimension associated with the agglomeration of economic activities. Then we worked out these three dimensions in the context of HSR station areas and attributed features accordingly. We concluded that the economic dimension far outweighs the others in academic debates, with dominant theories being primarily concerned with land use, accessibility, and economic performance. Studies from the urban design field have tackled the spatial elements of place quality and showed a strong correlation with economic dimension. However, the literature remains insufficiently developed when it comes to addressing user experience and “sense of place.”

The UNESCO 2011 Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) states community participation is an essential tool to elicit values attributed by diverse stakeholders in built heritage, to better prioritise actions based on public interests and needs. Traditional value elicitation often takes place in an expert-driven process following value typology frameworks, which is, however, widely criticised under the self-examination and reflection within built heritage protection and management. Therefore, it is still not adequately explored how values of built heritage can be identified through a process-led methodology of inclusive public participation. Using the method of a systematic literature review, this paper collected and analysed documents published between 2010 and 2020, from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. The findings show that process-led value elicitation has been widely discussed and applied within the international practices of built heritage management, as five main themes are synthesised in this paper. This review could be inspiring and pioneering in the field of international built heritage management, pushing methodological changes to focus more on the use and significance of heritage in local residents and their living experiences.

In the digital age, time spent outdoor in green areas is significantly decreasing for children living in cities. With the advent of digital technology, a series of digital tools are gradually integrated into children’s lives and act as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, an increasing number of children tend to stay at home and play digital games instead of interacting with nature; on the other hand, new digital technology is increasingly being used to engage children with outdoor activities. A host of studies have investigated children’s behaviour in the natural environment. However, a systematic literature review of children’s interaction with the urban green infrastructure (UGI) and the respective role of digital environment, based on a theoretical framework that explicitly takes the multi-level determinants and individual-level mechanism of behaviour change into account does not exist yet. This work provides a conceptual framework that covers various determinants, such as motivation, capability, and opportunity related factors of children’s behaviour in terms of their UGI interaction at the city and neighbourhood levels, while taking into account the individual-level mechanism of behavioural change and the role of the digital environment. The framework is used to systematically review recent international empirical evidence on the determinants of children–UGI interaction. The results are useful for laying the theoretical foundation for future empirical research on children–UGI interaction, specifically in the presence of digital interventions. They also provide urban/digital intervention designers and policymakers with theory-based design and policy guidelines for the creation of child-friendly UGI.

Incorporating users’ experiences in transport hub (re)development has become paramount, especially in the case of (high-speed) railway stations located in central urban locations. Designing “quality” according to users’ perspectives requires that we rethink about the dimensions to be prioritized, but also consider the variegated perspectives of users. Drawing on data from a survey of 452 users of the Amsterdam Central station area in the Netherlands, the relative importance of three value perspectives (node, place, and experience) on place quality were assessed through exploratory factor analysis. Seven quality factors were identified. Furthermore, relationships between socio-demographic characteristics and quality perceptions were simultaneously analyzed using a path analysis. The outcome showed that age and gender play a key role in explaining different quality perceptions. Senior citizens attach a higher importance to basic needs and safety and advanced services, while women also find wayfinding important. Moreover, education and visiting purpose influence other aspects of place quality perception, such as shopping or transfer. These findings provide a better understanding of place quality considerations in railway station areas in general and can serve as guidelines for the improvement of Amsterdam Central station, in particular.

With this commentary, we share our reflections at the end of a five-year interdisciplinary research project (from 2016 to 2020) on cycling innovations in living labs across the Netherlands. The commentary is the product of a collective writing effort of the researchers. It combines reflections on both the content of our research project (cycling through the lens of innovations) from various disciplinary perspectives – including socio-technical transitions, mobilities, urban design, transport planning and history – and reflections on the transdisciplinary approach (living labs) underpinning our research. We hope that our reflections can benefit other researchers concerned with similar topics and approaches. Our research project, Smart Cycling Futures (SCF), began as a proposal within the Smart Urban Regions of the Future (SURF) program, funded by the Dutch Council for Academic Research (NWO). This call of €16.5 million was co-financed by the Dutch Ministries of Infrastructure & Environment and Internal Affairs. As one of the five winning consortia – the other consortia focused on self-driving cars, influencing travel behaviour, demand-oriented public transport, and small-scale experiments – our group of mobility-oriented researchers played an active role in shaping the evolving landscape of smart mobility innovation in the Netherlands.

To better face the challenges of rapid urbanisation, it is recommended urban heritage management is carried out through community participation. In the Chinese context of state centralisation, however, inclusive participatory governance for urban heritage has remained limited, and effective ways of engaging residents in decision-making have yet to be explored adequately. This paper aims to explore community participation within Chinese urban heritage management, taking the Old Town of Lijiang as a case study. During fieldwork, in-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with both native and migrant residents as well as administrators. Based on a community participation assessment framework, the interview guide was developed and then built on four aspects: community participation in decision-making; the competence of participants; the right to social justice and confidence of participants; and community empowerment and equity. This paper reveals the current state of participatory practices in the Old Town of Lijiang and, specifically, discusses the roles of residents, elites and community-based organisations in decision-making concerning urban heritage management, in the contexts of state-centralisation. Chinese urban heritage management needs to raise public awareness and willingness as well as give residents more responsibilities and power to face the challenges of rapid urbanisation, but currently, the degree of participation is still minimal, only between informing and consulting.

In urban planning and transportation research, indices have been developed to measure the walkability of neighborhoods based on land-use and transportation characteristics. Despite the extensive work on the development of walkability measures, the empirical validation of the measures has received only limited attention. The aim of this study is to test assumptions made in existing walkability indices. Based on a national neighborhood data set combined with three years of national travel survey data from the Netherlands, the relationships between physical neighborhood characteristics and walking frequency are identified through regression analysis. In the regression model, distance to supermarket, number of daily goods stores within 1 km, number of cafeterias within 1 km, total inland water, land use for residential buildings, and high urban density were found to be significant. Our analysis indicates that existing indices only partly capture variation in walkability. We find that mismatches emerge on the level of both the selection and weighting of variables. Based on the results we identify ways to improve existing indices to measure walkability.

Transportation infrastructure networks (TINs), and the accessibility that they provide, are argued to be major determinants of land-use change. However, the spatio-temporal extent of their impact on urbanization is unclear and calls for further investigation. This paper empirically investigates the impact of both road and transit networks on urbanization in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area (GTHA) from 1971 to 2016, using a traffic analysis zone (TAZ) level panel database of 17,160 observations. It first documents and measures the magnitude, location and rate of urbanization and TINs' development in the region and in relation to each other using descriptive and buffer analyses. It then estimates the share of transport accessibility in urbanization over time and space using fixed effects panel regression models. Our findings demonstrate the significant extent of the ongoing sprawl, the substantial historical and current difference between the potential transit and car travel times, and the stability of the potential car travel times despite improvements to the road network. They also highlight the importance of urban proximity in prompting urbanization and the decreasing impact of transit improvement on urban development in urban areas and over time. A policy implication is that to encourage transit-oriented development, it is more effective to introduce or reinforce connections to activity centers rather than invest in reducing travel times to reach them.

Methods of articulating the morphological structure of slums can have considerable potential in better planning for site-specific design or policy responses for these areas in the contemporary city. Although urban morphology traditionally studies landscapes as stratified residues with distinct divisions between lot and boundary, built and unbuilt, the authors find these definitions insufficient to address the complexity of slum morphology. Through this article, the authors’ identify that morphological analysis of informal settlements needs to be sensitive to the dynamics and the absence (or blurring) of physical boundaries. By analyzing the spatial impact of social, economic, and political factors, situational and site factors, building typologies, and configurations of circulation space, an attempt to articulate the morphological structure of slums is made. Aiming to overcome the current polarization in the literature between the formal and informal city, this article adds to the ongoing research on the study of challenges within contemporary cities, by providing new methodologies for studying the morphology of slum urbanization and shaping planning practice.

Community participation is an essential issue in heritage management. The international heritage organisation ICCROM published a guidance document discussing people-centred approaches to heritage management in 2015. Cultural heritage management is recommended to be carried out through a community participation process. Despite the growing literature on community participation in cultural heritage management, little research has been done on comparing Chinese to international approaches. Although in China several pilot projects have conducted effective community participation and achieved excellent outcomes. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing an overview that compares and discusses the similarities and differences between Chinese and international approaches. A systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art was conducted to explore these differences based on four themes: engaged communities, participatory methods, degrees of participation and steps taken within cultural heritage management. This review concludes both Chinese and international practices seek to collaborate with and empower local communities in their approaches, with Chinese pilot cases, such as Tianzifang in Shanghai. However, in general, Chinese cultural heritage management is government-led, in which community participation is happening to a minimal degree. China is encouraged to learn from international practices when developing contextualised management approaches, to better face the challenges of rapid urbanisation.

Cycle highways, also known as “fast cycle routes”, are an emerging concept in urban planning that describes long distance, high quality bicycle routes built for commuter use. In Northern European countries, large sums of money are invested into cycle highways promising to induce a mode shift with little critical assessment as to how cyclists experience these infrastructures. Through eleven interviews of practitioners from five European countries – the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom and Denmark – this paper explores how practitioners define cycle highways and how their conceptualizations of cycling experience shape the physical design of cycle highways. Results show that while practitioners are guided by infrastructural standards for cycle highways such as width, design speed, and intersection treatments, it is less clear how these infrastructure elements fit within the surrounding environment to create desirable cycling experiences. In addition to commuters, cycle highways are also used by recreational and sport cyclists, so policy makers and designers should consider a wide variety of user groups and their aesthetic and social experiences in the planning and design of cycle highways. Future research should investigate cycle highway experiences from the perspective of various user types.

In this article, we investigate the co-evolutionary logics of organizational (environment, landscapes, architecture), institutional (governance and policy), and territorial (religion, activities, society) paradigms that have shaped the North Brabant province of the Netherlands. The authors postulate that the layering of socio-economic and spatial paradigms based on an interwoven ecology and interdependence of soil types, economic activities, infrastructures, and religion lead to a unique developmental logic within the region. This article expands on the historical layering of landscapes (urban, peri-urban, and rural) and transitions, attested by the region’s agricultural legacy (small scale farms, estates, and various soil types), merged with the legacy of industrial and post-industrial era transformations (industrial complexes, religious institutions). The article argues that the strength of the region lies in its mosaic of urbanity, farmland, and spread of spatial and economic activities, determining its current post-industrial landscape.

The UNESCO 2011 Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) states community participation is a pivotal tool for integrating heritage practices into sustainable urban development. While community participation is significant but limited in China, various participatory methods have been developed, tested and evaluated worldwide. For example, inspired by HUL, the Ballarat Imagine in Australia has successfully used public engagement in the development of a community vision for local conservation and development. This paper aims to contextualise community participation in China, by testing and adapting a community participatory method, the (Ballarat) Imagine. Imagine was tested in the Old Town of Lijiang as an academic scoping exercise, to critically examine its viability and potential for contextualisation to the Chinese context. During the fieldwork, three workshops were organised with residents in Dayan, Shuhe and Baisha, which are the three housing clusters constituting the World Heritage property. In the workshops, residents responded to three sets of questions focussing on their feelings about local historic urban landscape as well as their ideas about future public engagement in local heritage management. This paper discusses the contextualised approach of community participation tailored to the management of the Old Town of Lijiang, and also China as a whole, seeking to find a balance between top-down and bottom-up processes. This academic exercise confirmed that the community participatory method, the Imagine, can be further adapted to the Chinese context. Further research could test it in other cities, to better face the challenges of rapid urbanisation.

By conceptualizing a link between the cycling experience and the associated methods in understanding the former, the perspective of a cyclist is highlighted as an opportunity for research in urban design. A systematic review of 20 empirical papers across a variety of disciplines covering both walking and cycling experiences was conducted. This paper links social, sensory and spatial experiences, and connects these experiences to textual, visual and evaluative methodologies. This paper proposes how cycling can be considered in design research; it also provides an insight into how various methods enhance our understanding of cyclists and their surroundings.

In comparison to other advanced economies, the rise of people living alone in Japan has been late and rapid, with singletons now accounting for almost half of all households in major cities. The normative and structural frameworks surrounding standard family-household formation, however, remain formidable, reducing life-course opportunities for non-family formers. This paper considers the household and housing pathways being negotiated by younger-adults living independently. In addition to various secondary data sources, we draw on qualitative interviews with 35 individuals from 28 Tokyo households in addressing manifestations of, and resistance to, atomisation and individualisation in the Japanese context. Our analysis focuses on meanings and practices of homemaking among renters and buyers in the growing sector of single-person dwellings, as well as the recent emergence of commercial shared housing. This analysis provides a contrast to discourses surrounding the “singles boom” and “the growing appeal of living alone” in Western cities.

As municipal management budgets for green space management are under pressure, there is an urgent need for new funding models for urban green space. Inspired by the TEEB study (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, 2010), it was hypothesized that the value of ecosystem services that urban green spaces provide, when monetized, will often be larger than the cost of management. This article describes an initiative to develop a tool that makes the financial benefits of green spaces visible in the municipal balance sheet. While the project was successful in producing the desired deliverables (a tool for inclusive finance for urban green spaces, eight in depth cases showing green spaces paying their way, a Community of Practice), it is recognized that the adoption of inclusive finance in municipalities depends critically on urban strategies that have efficiency and resilience at their core.

Children's participation in the decision-making and design of urban public spaces is crucial for achieving inclusive cities. International covenants have recognized the importance of participation as a right. Having adhered to these agreements, Turkey is obliged to enable children's participation in all public matters that concern them, including shaping urban spaces. This paper analyses national and local legislation in Turkey and Istanbul to distil how children's right to participate is legislated and institutionalised. It shows that lack of integrated child-responsive legislation, accounting for children's individuality, and lack of collaboration between national and local governments are the root of the problem.