Sustainable Mobilities, Spatial Planning and Urban Livability

Dear Colleagues,

Transport systems are often described as the lifeblood of cities, but they can equally be the death knell in terms of their liveability. Whilst transport infrastructures are theoretically designed to improve mobilities and accessibility to goods, services and activities, they are all too often poorly integrated with the spatial planning of urban settlements, so that they interrupt rather than facilitate people’s mobilities and prevent or hamper their social wellbeing and reduce the benefits of urban living. While policymakers in the Global North are desperately looking for ways to encourage people out of their cars and to walk, cycle and use public transport to make cities more sustainable, their counterparts in the Global South are building new road infrastructures to cater for an escalating demand for motorized transport. In both instances, more sustainable mobilities cannot be achieved unless we can build more liveable and accessible cities, which reduce the need to travel between our homes and our economic and social activities and support healthier, safer and environmentally benign mobilities environments. Sustainable living is the stated objective of many city plans worldwide. This can only be achieved through the integrated planning of cities and their urban conurbations so that sustainable and just mobilities are the preferred option for everyone instead of the option of last choice for people without private vehicles. This need for housing/land-use/transport planning integration has been widely discussed within the academic literatures but, whether situated in the Global North or South, these different policy regimes rarely interact outside of their theoretical framings. In practice, urban planning continues to spin the rhetoric of urban liveability whilst promulgating policies and processes that undermine integrated transport and land-use planning and housing development to the detriment of human health and social wellbeing and equity.

The Special Issue will draw together the hitherto fragmented discourses and debates surrounding what constitutes urban liveability and how transport, mobilities and spatial planning can undermine or contribute to this. It will bring together leading scholars working within and between the different disciplinary domains of mobilities, urban planning, social wellbeing and social justice to explore and debate the intersectionalities within the urban liveability concept. In doing so, it aims to highlight multiple disciplinary perspectives on what constitutes urban liveability for different people in different places and to illustrate how the practical complexities surrounding the delivery of integrated transport and urban planning (or a lack of) connive to undermine inclusive and resilient urban development. It will also explore how different theoretical framings and planning and decision processes can work to better integrate the interactions between urban expansion, housing development and environmentally and socially sustainable access to goods, services and livelihoods.

Whilst the intention is to synthesise and supplement the existing knowledge base pertaining to the urban liveability debate and how mobilities systems and urban morphologies contribute to or detract from this, the overarching objective of the Special Issue is to develop new knowledge and understandings through inter-disciplinary perspectives. In doing so, the aim is to catalyse more integrated urban planning approaches to address the significant development challenges that all cities face, whether in the northern or southern hemispheres, in their transition to more inclusive and resilient climate neutral urban living. Contributions are encouraged from theoretical, methodological and/or empirical analytical perspectives and can be case study specific or more generalized in their research focus. Qualitative and quantitative research approaches are equally encouraged. Literature reviews or uncompleted empirical studies are not encouraged.

Prof. Dr. Karen Lucas
Guest Editor

Ms. Emma Tsoneva
Co-Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• just cities
• healthy cities
• transport
• accessibility
• planning
• urban
• wellbeing
• equity