Dear Colleagues,

Despite covering only 2% of the Earth’s surface, cities are responsible for the consumption of about 78% of the world’s energy and the production of more than 60% of greenhouse gas emissions [1]. In terms of resource flows, a prominent role is played by urban–rural connections, which entail various kinds of exchanges, such as flows of people (e.g., migrations, commuting), goods (e.g., food and energy) and, in modern society, knowledge.

Moreover, in recent decades, urban areas have been growing at an unprecedented pace, and such growth sometimes takes place in absence of any planning or is accompanied by poor or ineffective planning, which has been creating both socioeconomic and environmental problems. On the socioeconomic side, ineffective and unfair urban policies have spurred urban poverty and social inequalities. On the environmental side, urban growth (especially in the form of urban sprawl) worldwide has been increasing air pollution, waste production, energy consumption, land take, and soil sealing, which generates biodiversity loss and affects the hydrological cycle by hindering infiltration and ultimately results in increased frequency and severity of natural hazard phenomena, including floods and landslides.

A possible way forward to address such issues is to tackle the rural–urban imbalance and pursue an integrated rural–urban development through appropriate and effective local/city-level policies and plans. This is also reinforced by the fact that global-level policies (such as, for instance, the United Nation 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or the UN-Habitat position documents) indicate required or desired directions of changes while identifying the urban, or suburban scale as the optimum scale at which such changes can, or should, reasonably be pursued through local policies.

This Special Issue will collect papers that present both theoretical and empirical studies aimed at supporting integrated regional and urban planning. Authors are expected to contribute through the introduction of novel quantitative approaches to address the aforementioned issues with particular reference to their space–time dimension. Advanced algorithms, platforms, and frameworks to describe, model, and visualize these complex geographical phenomena are especially welcome.

References:

1. United Nations. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision (ST/ESA/SER.A/420); United Nations: New York, NY, USA.

Dr. Federico Amato
Dr. Sabrina Lai
Dr. Alessandro Marucci
Prof. Dr. Beniamino Murgante
Dr. Lorena Fiorini
Guest Editors

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• environmental modelling
• geocomputation
• urban and regional planning