Search Results (365)

Urban transport is increasingly shifting from an efficiency-oriented approach toward accessibility-based and socio-spatial justice paradigms. This paper aims to synthesize current trends and emerging directions in transport and mobility, with a particular emphasis on sustainability and equity. While existing state-of-the-art reviews have extensively documented the technical evolution of smart mobility systems and decarbonization in transport infrastructures, this study introduces an integrated perspective that connects transport and mobility transitions with the concept of socio-spatial justice. The study employs a systematic literature review grounded in the Knowledge Development Process–Constructivist (ProKnow-C) model, and structured through thematic analysis around three axes: digitalization; integrated mobility platforms; and socio-spatial justice. The bibliographic database for this analysis is composed of 88 publications. The research suggests that the field is undergoing a gradual shift from a predominantly technical transport and mobility engineering toward a socio-technical approach increasingly shaped by sustainability and social equity. The transition toward low-carbon infrastructures and accessibility-driven mobility models, supported by digital technologies and Mobility-as-a-Service platforms, presents significant opportunities to fulfill global climate objectives (SDG 13), promote sustainable urban development (SDG 11) and strengthen socio-spatial justice (SDGs 10, 11). However, evidence also indicates that technological innovation alone cannot guarantee equitable opportunities in urban transport transitions. In this context, public participation becomes essential to prevent greenwashing and the so-called “transport mirage,” while ensuring that equity and justice are embedded in transport and mobility planning. Full article

This conceptual article examines under what institutional conditions online and asynchronous teaching can support sustainable academic participation across care responsibilities and career interruptions. It brings feminist scholarship on care into dialogue with research on academic labour, temporality and online education through a purposive, iterative engagement with the literature. Three retrospectively reconstructed auto-socio-biographical vignettes inform the conceptual inquiry without serving as representative empirical evidence. The article develops a framework linking temporal justice, infrastructures of participation and academic continuity encompassing the institutionally mediated capacity to return. It distinguishes the spatial possibilities of online teaching from the temporal and communicative arrangements of asynchronous teaching, examining the participation they enable, the labour and costs they redistribute, and the institutional responsibilities they entail. The capacity to return is proposed as one dimension of sustainable academic lives, rather than sufficient evidence of sustainability: re-entry may remain precarious or dependent on unrecognised work. Four institutional implications follow: recognising the full teaching workload, protecting temporal boundaries, resourcing pedagogical support and contextualising career evaluation. The article argues that flexibility supports sustainability when institutions preserve meaningful possibilities to participate, interrupt and return while assuming responsibility for the conditions that make these possibilities practicable. Full article

Land capitalization has become a key mechanism in China’s rural transformation, converting dispersed natural villages into centralized resettled communities for landless peasants and reshaping their everyday life through urbanized housing, infrastructure, and governance arrangements. However, these visible spatial gains do not necessarily translate into equitable long-term outcomes. This paper examines the structural tension between spatial improvement and contested justice through a case study of Guange Village, China. It investigates how land capitalization reshapes rural resettlement after spatial allocation has been completed. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, local socio-economic data, and documentary materials, the study reinterprets the distributional, procedural, and recognition dimensions of spatial justice through a temporal lens, incorporating insights from the Impoverishment Risks and Reconstruction model to examine how justice disputes emerge and accumulate after resettlement. The findings show that spatial improvement did not eliminate justice disputes, but displaced them into the long-term processes of livelihood reconstruction, community governance, and social reproduction. Distributionally, compensation and land-rent payments were insufficient to offset rising living costs and employment mismatches. Procedurally, conflicts shifted from land acquisition to property management, community operation, and collective responsibility. In terms of recognition, standardized apartment living disrupted rural practices, while family-based inheritance and intergenerational support absorbed part of the institutional tension. The paper concludes that spatial justice in land capitalization should be understood as a dynamic post-allocation process rather than a one-off outcome of compensation, and calls for rural resettlement policies that integrate livelihood support, participatory governance, and recognition of rural social relations. Full article

Cooperative Housing has become a vital participatory urban strategy to address the growing housing challenges of the 21st century, particularly in contexts marked by political, socio-economic and spatial inequalities. This paper examines cooperative housing in East Jerusalem as a form of transformative resilience that operates under conditions of colonial domination and spatial injustice. In response to the systemic challenges confronting the Palestinian housing sector—including the denial of building permits, land confiscation, restrictive planning regimes, and the absence of equitable legal and institutional frameworks—this paper explores locally driven cooperative housing initiatives as alternative pathways for securing housing rights and sustaining urban presence. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of spatial injustice, transformative resilience, and participatory design, and drawing on selected Palestinian-led cooperative housing cases, the study demonstrates how communities mobilize collective action, shared resources, and participatory processes to navigate exclusionary planning systems and resist spatial injustice. By examining the relationship between participatory design and transformative resilience, this paper highlights the critical role of community agency in producing adaptive, inclusive, and context-sensitive spatial practices. It contributes to broader debates on housing justice by demonstrating how cooperative models can challenge dominant housing paradigms, and offer alternative frameworks for collective governance, spatial empowerment, and transformative resilience in contexts shaped by persistent inequality and political constraints. Full article

This research explores how architectural design strategies can effectively contribute to women’s empowerment. In development contexts, women’s needs vary, ranging from relief and healthcare to education and economic income generation, each requiring a different strategy. Given the lack of an analytical framework to elucidate these gender-sensitive architectural interventions, we draw upon a theoretical framework encompassing the five dimensions of empowerment, along with the spatial dimension we have introduced, as well as the concept of spaces for Harvey and Lefebvre, and feminist critiques of architecture. We develop an analytical tool to evaluate gender empowerment in architecture, applied to eight projects in diverse contexts across the Global South: countries in Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Israel), Africa (Rwanda, Morocco, Malawi, and Tanzania), and Latin America (Mexico), that share common features such as structural gender inequality, development challenges and conflicts. Projects are analyzed according to the six dimensions of empowerment, resulting in a matrix. The matrix reveals three strategies: short-term tactical, long-term structural, and flexible transitional strategies that act as an intermediate solution between short-term tactical and long-term structural strategies. Within each, there are concrete design strategies. Our study demonstrates that structural strategies are the most sustainable and effective in achieving women’s empowerment dimensions. This study constitutes an additional step toward a design framework that guides future architectural practice toward sustainable empowerment-oriented projects for women. Full article

Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) is a systematically interconnected network of natural and semi-natural spaces. By integrating blue hydrological systems—such as rivers, wetlands, and retention ponds—with green vegetation ecosystems including urban parks, green corridors, and green roofs, BGI delivers multifunctional ecosystem services and represents a core paradigm of nature-based solutions. Leading international practices, such as Singapore’s Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters Programme and Denmark’s Copenhagen Sankt Kjelds Square climate adaptation project, have demonstrated that BGI plays a critical role in enhancing urban resilience, mitigating climate change impacts, improving human well-being, and supporting sustainable urban development. However, traditional BGI planning has long relied on a top-down, technocratic and administrative management paradigm. This approach frequently overlooks localized community needs and everyday lived experiences, giving rise to environmental injustices such as misallocated ecological resources, spatial marginalization, and green gentrification. To address these challenges, this study aims to clarify how public preferences can be effectively translated into hard planning constraints, while investigating whether and how a stakeholder-driven co-design approach can mitigate land-use conflicts and enhance spatial equity in high-density urban renewal contexts. Grounded in spatial justice and social–ecological systems (SES) theory, this study develops an institutionalized BGI co-design theoretical framework consisting of four sequential stages: stakeholder mapping, demand translation, conflict negotiation, and adaptive governance. Furthermore, a functional mapping mechanism is established to convert qualitative community demands into operational planning parameters. Based on qualitative text analysis of a high-density urban renewal case study, this research empirically validates the efficacy and applicability of the proposed framework. The findings indicate that embedding the diverse demands of non-dominant stakeholders and vulnerable groups into planning constraints significantly improves the spatial accessibility, equity, and inclusiveness of BGI, while strengthening urban governance resilience to future uncertainties. This research provides novel theoretical insights and actionable policy implications for optimizing spatial governance and advancing equitable BGI planning in high-density cities. Full article

The Alqueva Multifunctional Project was conceived as a development infrastructure for southern Portugal, promising agricultural modernisation, demographic stabilisation, job creation and territorial cohesion. This article examines the gap between these promises and the project’s outcomes through an analysis of documents, census data, sectoral indicators and a territorial case-study approach. The results reveal a clear paradox, as significant achievements were observed in the water, agriculture, energy and tourism sectors, including the expansion of irrigation, growth in exports, greater water security and innovation in the field of renewable energy. However, these sectoral gains have coexisted with ongoing depopulation, an ageing population, the precarious nature of the migrant workforce, land concentration, poor local value retention and growing environmental pressures. The article argues that this contradiction reflects a development model shaped by neoextractivism, accumulation through dispossession and the limited capture of territorial rent. Alqueva thus demonstrates how technically successful infrastructure projects can fail to generate inclusive territorial development when redistribution, institutional coordination and local integration remain inadequate and when effective mechanisms for spatial justice are lacking. Full article

This article provides a critical and thematically structured literature review of Envi-ronmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) urbanism as it intersects with the right to the city, green gentrification, affordable housing, public-private partnerships, and partici-patory governance. Drawing from 52 scholarly and research-led sources centered on 2020–2025, while re-taining selected foundational earlier works, the study examines how ESG frameworks are adopted, contested, and operationalized across diverse urban contexts. While ESG has emerged as a dominant paradigm in urban planning and real estate, the review reveals its frequent co-optation by market-driven agendas, which risk reproducing socio-spatial inequalities under the guise of sustainability. At the same time, the literature highlights promising alternatives rooted in environmental justice, multispecies ethics, legal reform, and community-led planning. The review advances the argument that ESG must be reframed not as a universal compliance model, but as a situated, justice-oriented framework capable of responding to the complex ecological and social realities of contemporary urbanization. By foregrounding relational governance, inclusive design, and equitable urban futures, the article contributes to an emerging research agenda that challenges technocratic sus-tainability and reclaims ESG as a transformative tool for spatial and environmental justice. Full article

Wind-energy expansion is indispensable to decarbonization, but a strong wind resource does not by itself establish that development is spatially suitable, socially legitimate or institutionally deliverable. This article develops an empirical spatial–legal screening framework that converts technical wind opportunity into Justice-adjusted Wind Development Potential (JAWDP). The analysis covers Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Germany, India, Kenya, Morocco, South Africa and the United Kingdom. A 25 km grid is used for the primary analysis and a 10 km grid for resolution sensitivity. The Wind-Resource Potential Index (WRPI) combines 100 m wind power density with grid remoteness; the Landscape-Conflict Index (LCI) combines protected-area coverage, ecological sensitivity, agricultural land, settlement exposure and cultural-heritage proximity; and the Legal and Justice Friction Index (LJFI) codes nine functional safeguards on a 0–2 scale. Equal component weights and a preregistered symmetric baseline of $\alpha =\beta =0.25$ are used in the multiplicative JAWDP model. The United Kingdom and Denmark rank first and second (0.702 and 0.697), followed by Morocco under a disclosed midpoint legal scenario (0.539). Grid-resolution changes leave ten country ranks unchanged and shift Chile and Germany by one position. Across the full preregistered sensitivity set, eleven countries are classified as stable and Germany as moderately stable. As an external plausibility check, JAWDP correlates with 2024 installed wind-capacity density (Spearman $\rho =0.692$, $p=0.013$) and 2015–2024 capacity-addition density ($\rho =0.699$, $p=0.011$). An additive equal-weight multicriteria benchmark produces only moderate rank correspondence ($\rho =0.559$), illustrating the non-compensatory purpose of the justice adjustment. The framework is intended for comparative screening, not as a prediction of generation, a grid-feasibility model or a substitute for project-level legal review. Additional robustness checks show high stability to sample composition and transmission-vintage perturbation, but the deployment association weakens under wind-suitable-area denominators; the external comparison is therefore interpreted as a denominator-sensitive plausibility check rather than empirical validation. Full article

Funeral-service facility relocation redistributes spatial burdens and public benefits among origin-site residents, destination communities, service users, and the wider public. Using the Xihuayuan–Haping Road relocation in Harbin, China, this study applies an LLM-assisted multi-actor scenario reasoning framework, operationalized as a structured comparative scenario analysis, to examine relocation governance from a spatial justice perspective. Six governance variables were organized into a 3⁶ full-factorial design, producing 729 scenarios. Each scenario was generated through a six-actor, six-stage LLM interaction and assessed by a separate standardized post-simulation LLM evaluation for NIMBY conflict intensity, relocation progress, resident acceptance, and spatial justice. The results show that new-site burden fairness produced the largest reduction in conflict intensity and the strongest improvement in resident acceptance, whereas siting-process transparency showed the largest improvement in relocation progress and spatial justice. Repeated runs of nine typical configurations and one case-approximate configuration showed point-score variation but retained the broad contrast between weaker and stronger governance conditions. The case-based findings indicate that relocation planning should combine burden fairness, procedural transparency, psychological buffering, service continuity, and public return rather than rely on technical compliance or site-selection standards alone. Full article

Urban sustainability governance has long been dominated by growth-oriented metrics that measure aggregate improvement without establishing whether neighborhoods provide enough for all residents without continuous territorial expansion or resource-intensive redevelopment. Drawing on the post-growth planning, sufficiency theory, spatial justice, land governance, and the adaptive planning literature, this paper proposes a Spatial Sufficiency Multifunctionality Framework (SSMF). SSMF is a provisional conceptual framework requiring empirical validation and aiming to reorient neighborhood land assessment from growth optimization to sufficiency thresholds. The framework organizes planning around five interconnected dimensions: social sufficiency, economic resilience without growth dependence, ecological resilience, spatial governance and land-use sufficiency, and institutional and participatory capacity. Each is operationalized through illustrative indicators, thresholds, and linked governance instruments. SSMF asks whether per-capita land use remains within ecological capacities and whether access to services, green space, and affordable space is equitably distributed. The framework is developed through a systematic scoping review of the literature on urban sustainability, land governance, and post-growth planning, and provides a diagnostic logic and a menu of governance instruments. By shifting the evaluative focus from “more” to “enough, equity distributed within neighborhood capacities,” SSMF offers a provisional architecture for understanding post-growth principles at the neighborhood scale. Full article

Urban landscapes are increasingly understood as dynamic systems in which natural, cultural, and socio-spatial layers continuously overlap and evolve. Within this perspective, heritage and memory are often treated as stable qualities of place, to be preserved or restored amid ongoing urban transformation. This paper challenges that static understanding by advancing memory-in-transformation, a theoretical framework positioned within the broader concept of Temporal Urbanism. Drawing on an integrative synthesis of landscape theory, critical heritage studies, memory studies, and urban theory, the paper argues that urban landscape transformation does not simply affect heritage and memory but actively produces, reconfigures, and redefines them over time. The framework rests on three interrelated dimensions: temporal layering, mediated interpretation, and dialectical production, through which transformation operates as a mediating process linking spatial change, collective memory, and the continuous formation of heritage landscapes. Illustrative cases (Superkilen, Copenhagen; the Slussen redevelopment, Stockholm) show how transformation can destabilize existing heritage while generating new heritage systems. The paper further introduces the notion of temporal justice, foregrounding whose memories are sustained or marginalized in processes of change, and outlines new directions for research and practice in heritage urbanism, land-use planning, landscape architecture, and sustainable urban development. Full article

Urban informality in amphibious territories represents a critical yet understudied dimension of contemporary urbanisation in the Global South. This article analyses the interrelations between spatial transformation, social equity, and environmental change in Las Flores, an informal settlement located between the Mallorquín Lagoon and the Magdalena River in Barranquilla, Colombia. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach combining GIS interpretation, participatory mapping, and in-depth interviews, the study examines how processes of informal territorialisation have reshaped both the physical landscape and the social fabric of this amphibious environment. Results indicate that the settlement has expanded progressively over the past two decades, occupying areas of the wetland previously covered by mangroves and natural vegetation. This expansion has been accompanied by environmental degradation, soil infilling, and declining water quality. Residents face persistent infrastructural deficits, limited access to education and healthcare, and increasing social fragmentation between the formal and informal sectors. Yet, the community also exhibits strong organisational capacity, adaptive livelihoods, and a deep sense of place that sustains local identity and resilience. These dynamics exemplify the paradox of amphibious life: coexistence with water as both a resource and a source of vulnerability. Building on these findings, the study develops an urban socio-ecological conceptualisation of Amphibious Justice, a framework for interpreting equity, recognition, and governance in hybrid territories where urbanisation and land–water dynamics intersect. The article proposes a framework of equitable amphibious urbanism that integrates environmental restoration, social inclusion, and participatory governance. The findings suggest that sustainability in such territories cannot be achieved through technocratic restoration or forced resettlement, but through co-produced strategies that recognise local knowledge, tenure security, and ecological stewardship. Ultimately, the case of Las Flores offers insights into how cities in the Global South can pursue just and adaptive coexistence with water amid growing climate and urban pressures. Full article

Disamenity and amenity facilities pull property values in opposite directions, yet prior studies have treated disamenities as a homogeneous category and have been constrained by data scattered across agencies and by mismatched spatial scales. This study integrates multi-source spatial data, comprising 3426 sub-districts (eup-myeon-dong) nationwide, a 500 m population grid of 376,668 cells, and the actual point locations of individual facilities, into a single spatial framework and applies a multi-method design that combines a spatial Durbin model (SDM), explainable machine learning (XGBoost–SHAP), an environmental-justice analysis, and a micro-siting analysis. Four findings emerge. First, not all disamenities are associated with lower prices: only pollution-emitting facilities with a clear emission signature, namely, sewage treatment plants and incinerators, capitalize robustly as cross-sectional associations, into both housing prices and officially assessed land values, with the effect extending into neighboring sub-districts rather than staying purely local. The other disamenities show no robust total effect on either price; their estimates are small or unstable across specifications. Second, capitalization of pollution-emitting facilities is pronounced in the urban sample and disappears in the rural one, and the coefficient structure differs overall between urban and rural areas (global Chow test, p < 10⁻²¹). Third, micro-siting analysis shows that where a facility is placed (siting) and what it leaves behind in prices (capitalization) are distinct layers, and that capitalization tracks the population a facility keeps nearby rather than its nuisance type: pollution-emitting facilities retain enough nearby housing for their burden to register, whereas funerary facilities sited far from people do not. Fourth, the environmental inequity of pollution exposure runs along income rather than age and concentrates in cities rather than in rural areas: the exposure rate among residents of low-income urban sub-districts (49%) is 2.5 times that of the urban population as a whole (19%), while the greater Seoul metropolitan area remains comparatively insulated. These layered findings were possible only once the dispersed spatial data had been integrated and standardized, and the study demonstrates that fusing and efficiently managing spatial data is a precondition for evidence-based land-use and environmental policy. Full article

Historic urban manufacturing territories are increasingly being reconsidered as strategic components of metropolitan sustainability rather than obsolete remnants of industrial economies slated for redevelopment. While these districts have long been associated with pollution, environmental degradation, and post-industrial decline, growing interest in circular economy strategies, Urban Resource Recovery (URR), and climate adaptation has renewed attention to their territorial significance. Using the North Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone and the Newtown Creek watershed as a case study, this paper argues that certain historic manufacturing territories possess an inherent capacity to evolve into Metropolitan Metabolic Infrastructure because of inherited geographic, infrastructural, and institutional characteristics, including waterfront access, freight networks, industrial zoning, large industrial parcels, and utility systems. Drawing upon research developed through the New York City Department of Design and Construction’s Town+Gown Urban Resource Recovery Working Group, the study combines historical analysis, spatial interpretation, planning policy, and case-study research to examine the evolving relationship among urban metabolism, circular economy, environmental justice, and Healthy Cities. Rather than advocating industrial preservation irrespective of environmental performance, the paper argues that these territories can support metropolitan material circulation while advancing cleaner industrial practices, environmental remediation, and more equitable urban development. The Metropolitan Metabolic Infrastructure framework offers a planning perspective for understanding how inherited manufacturing landscapes may contribute to resilient, circular, and healthier metropolitan regions while informing future comparative research on industrial territories undergoing similar transitions worldwide. Full article