Expanding Cities, Diminishing Space

Dear Colleagues,

The world’s total human population is expected to hit 10 billion in the 2060s, with more than 70% of people concentrated in urban areas. Cities are not only growing in population, but are expanding in area. Even with a constant number of inhabitants, there is ongoing demand for more space. There are general cultural, economic and demographic shifts that drive expectations and perceptions as to how space is used. Specifically, it has been observed that despite near-constant population numbers, per-capita demand for residential floor space is still growing in some cities. This may be due to higher living standards, changes in social structure resulting in high percentages of single person households, or a combination of these and other factors. The totality of urban infrastructures (e.g., transport infrastructure, utilities, industrial zones, commerce, logistics centers, event and leisure facilities, etc.) consume additional space and demand for resources. While the “hunger” in the literal sense for food and resources is growing, the “spaces in between” (e.g., agricultural land, vacant spaces, green space, natural retreats, other buffer zones) can be highly-variable in their interspersion with urban infrastructure and their perceived utility to meet demand for services valued by humans (i.e., ecosystem services). These aspects of city expansion and re-apportionment of land uses lead, not only to massive changes at spatial scales from the village to mega-cities all over the world, but they also create multiple social, economic, and environmental challenges, with chances and risks which may be best dealt with in the planning process.

So, on the one hand, there is the threat that the permanent demand for more space leads to a number of consequences, such as scarcity of resources, infrastructural bottlenecks, pollution and devastation of land, and subsequent social conflict. Questions arise on how to deal with these problems at short notice, and what has to be done to find solutions to these challenges by thinking in terms of longer-term strategies. Overall, the challenges and problems seem huge and intractable. However, largely because of the daily interface between governance and getting citizen needs met, cities are arguably the more adaptive level of governance, compared to state, or national governments. To help cities gain a sense of material flows and how land use can be best leveraged toward ecosystem services, more and more unprecedented technologies are available to monitor and manage cities and thereby inform policy. Monitoring is as well done by remote and in-situ sensing, with both high precision and nearly in real-time. Approaches to fully utilize these data are key.

This situation suggests that there is potential to overcome disciplinary barriers and promote a holistic view of the city—an approach that urban planners claim to have been using forever. With all the technology in focus, of course, the goals of sustainability and resilience remain as important as they have always been. Cities are mainly about people and not about technology, so it is still “quality of life” that can and should be in focus.

The upcoming conference REAL CORP 2018 (http://conference.corp.at/) will support this Special Issue by bringing together the best literature and presentation papers, and hence illustrate the current state-of-the-art, as well as present projects and approaches for the use of future technology in the cities of today and tomorrow.

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