Sustainable Comparative Urban and Regional Development in Times of Crisis

Dear Colleagues,

Urban development is often and repeatedly confronted by crises. We observe ‘old’ crises such as structural change, and, most recently, as a crisis of global force, the COVID-19 pandemic, affecting health, economies, education, and also requirements for urban development. In many cases it is still unclear to what extent cities are changed now and will change in the future, and future-oriented solutions for a sustainable and crisis-proof development may exist. Nevertheless, cities all over the world react in one way or another to crises and are eager to discover best practices and learn from errors. Some scholars argue that crises might offer room for creativity and experiments, such as Schneidewind et al (2020) in their suggestions for the ‘Post corona city’, and Pallagst et al. when they discover ‘out of the box’ strategies for shrinking cities. This Special Issue aims to build on the exchange of knowledge generated by comparative research on urban development. It intends to bring together scholarly work on the design of comparative research, its possibilities and limitations. As the scope of comparisons can extend to a large array of topics, we narrow it down to the way urban development responds to crises. We invite articles on a broad range of topics on both theoretical work regarding comparative formats and also in terms of results of comparative cases of urban development in times of crisis. 

References

Pallagst, K.; Vargas-Hernándes, J.; Hammer, P. Green Innovation Areas—En route to sustainability for shrinking cities? Sustainability 2019, 11, 6674. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11236674.

Schneidewind, U.; Baedeker, C.; Bierwirth, A.; Caplan, A.; Haake, H. Näher—Öffentlicher—Agiler, Eckpfeiler einer resilienten Post-Corona-Stadt; Wuppertal Institute: Wuppertal, Germany, 2020.

Prof. Dr. Karina Pallagst
Mr. Rene Fleschurz
Prof. Dr. Thorsten Wiechmann
Dr. Helen Mulligan
Dr. Paulo Conceição
Guest Editors

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