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Intelligent Future Habitats: Sustainable Building, Planning, and Landscape

This special issue belongs to the section “Architectural Design, Urban Science, and Real Estate“.

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue, “Intelligent Future Habitats: Sustainable Building, Planning, and Landscape”, focuses on emerging computational, robotic, and health-oriented paradigms in green/low-carbon buildings and habitat environmental design. With the rapid integration of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC), robotic 3D printing, and digital fabrication in architectural and planning practices, the built environment is undergoing a fundamental transformation toward intelligent, low-carbon, and human-centered systems. At the same time, climate extremity, urban health challenges, and tourism recovery from the pandemic have intensified the demand for building forms, construction methods, and landscape strategies that are simultaneously adaptive, resilient, and sustainable.

The primary focus of this Special Issue on “Intelligent Future Habitats” lies in AI-driven architectural design, robotic 3D printing-based construction, extreme-environment building morphology, low-carbon prefabricated systems, and ergonomically driven optimization in hotel and tourism facilities, indoor health environment, resilient cities, sustainable landscape, and plants in indoor/ outdoor landscape. These themes aim to explore how algorithmic design, intelligent manufacturing, and performance-based morphology can significantly reduce embodied and operational carbon while improving environmental adaptability and user experience.

In addition, this Special Issue extends into three complementary directions: (1) healthy cities and indoor health, with special attention to neuroarchitecture and environmental psychology; (2) sustainable landscape planning, plant resilience and its application in landscape design (outdoor plant landscape planning and design), and multifunctional properties of plants in indoor landscape and application (indoor plant landscape planning and design); and (3) responsive and intelligent environment design, including digital health environments and embodied cognition–based spatial intelligence.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to establish an interdisciplinary platform that bridges architecture, urban planning, landscape design, environmental psychology, digital fabrication, and artificial intelligence. It aims to advance both theoretical frameworks and practical methodologies by integrating data-driven models, robotic construction, cognitive science, and sustainability science. In doing so, this issue will supplement the existing literature, which often treats low-carbon construction, health-oriented design, and intelligent systems as isolated topics, offering a holistic and performance-oriented perspective.

We warmly invite original research articles, reviews, and case studies that contribute innovative theories, computational methods, empirical evidence, and real-world applications addressing sustainable, intelligent, and health-driven built environments.

Dr. Gangwei Cai
Dr. Nan Zhang
Dr. Zi-Ming Ren
Dr. Sheng He
Guest Editors

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-blind 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

  • AIGC architectural design
  • robotic 3D printing construction
  • extreme environment building form
  • low-carbon prefabricated buildings
  • ergonomic-driven hotel design
  • sustainable tourism
  • adaptive building
  • resilient urban planning
  • healthy cities
  • indoor environmental health
  • neuroarchitecture
  • sustainable landscape planning
  • plant resilience/application in landscape design
  • multifunctional properties of plants in indoor andscape/application
  • responsive environment design
  • digital health environment
  • embodied cognition
  • intelligent built environment
  • sustainable development goals (SDGs)

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Buildings - ISSN 2075-5309