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Research on Promoting the Social Sustainability of Urban Neighbourhoods—2nd Edition
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Research on Promoting the Social Sustainability of Urban Neighbourhoods—2nd Edition

A special issue of Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309). This special issue belongs to the section "Architectural Design, Urban Science, and Real Estate".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2026 | Viewed by 552

Editor

Dr. Fanglei Zhong

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Economics, Minzu University of China, Beijing 100081, China
Interests: Sustainable Development Goals; residential energy consumption transition; natural resource management; ecological economics; biological and cultural diversity; shared socio-economic pathways scenarios; peak carbon emissions and carbon-neutral pathways
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Creating sustainable cities means blending buildings and people in a balanced way. As we improve our physical infrastructure, managing it in a socially responsible way becomes key. This Special Issue, "Research on Promoting the Social Sustainability of Urban Neighbourhoods—2nd Edition," focuses on managing the human aspects of sustainability in city areas. This effort supports reaching the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, which aims to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable by 2030.

Considering the complexity and diversity of city environments, this Special Issue covers various topics. We are looking for contributions that look into how to assess and improve social sustainability in urban areas, both broadly and in detail. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Methods to assess urban neighbourhood sustainability.
  • Factors like the design of spaces, energy use, carbon emissions, culture, and climate change.
  • Community involvement, community management, and the role of different organizations in enhancing social sustainability.
  • Urban resilience: What it involves, how to measure it, factors affecting it, and how to improve it.

We invite researchers, professionals, and policymakers to contribute their insights to this Special Issue.

Dr. Fanglei Zhong
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 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.

Keywords

  • social sustainability
  • urban neighbourhood
  • resilience
  • Sustainable Development Goals

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

36 pages, 15957 KB  
Article
Who Belongs in the Neighbourhood? Food Delivery Riders’ Spatial Experience and Perceived Inclusion in Chinese Gated Communities
by Yi Li, Li Zhu, Haoyu Deng, Quhan Chen, Siyu Zhang, Xiangxiang Chen and Chenxi Song
Buildings 2026, 16(16), 3314; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings16163314 - 20 Aug 2026
Viewed by 197
Abstract
As China’s dominant urban housing form, gated residential communities deploy layered spatial access controls governing who may enter and move through neighbourhood space. While neighbourhood social sustainability has attracted substantial scholarly attention, how micro-spatial governance arrangements affect the inclusiveness of residential built environments [...] Read more.
As China’s dominant urban housing form, gated residential communities deploy layered spatial access controls governing who may enter and move through neighbourhood space. While neighbourhood social sustainability has attracted substantial scholarly attention, how micro-spatial governance arrangements affect the inclusiveness of residential built environments toward essential service workers remains underexplored. Drawing on Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, this study uses food delivery riders—who navigate gated community access controls dozens of times daily—as an analytical lens to evaluate how neighbourhood spatial governance shapes social inclusiveness. Vignette-based survey data from 445 riders across 157 cities in 27 Chinese provinces were analysed using structural equation modeling. Results show that cumulative anxiety from procedural delays, detours, and elevator waiting is the dominant pathway through which spatial governance undermines riders’ perceived spatial inclusion—operationalised through occupational dignity indicators—with elevator-based spatial stratification identified as a concrete, low-cost intervention target within the spatial-channeling mechanism. Technology-mediated access partially mitigates face-to-face exclusion but leaves underlying spatial inequalities intact. Demographic invariance across all tested variables confirms that diminished inclusion arises from the governance regime itself. The findings position neighbourhood spatial governance as a measurable dimension of urban social sustainability—one concretely testable through the experience of essential service workers—and identify low-cost built-environment interventions for inclusive residential design. While the study focuses on riders as a single user group, the analytical framework is transferable to evaluating how residential built environments accommodate diverse non-resident populations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Research on Promoting the Social Sustainability of Urban Neighbourhoods—2nd Edition)
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