Sustainable Brownfield (Re)Developments Versus Urban Growth Demands: Opportunities and Challenges
A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Urban Contexts and Urban-Rural Interactions".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 27 February 2026 | Viewed by 9
Special Issue Editor
Interests: contaminated land; risk assessment and management; climate change; sustainability; Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); water; energy; waste; carbon footprint
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The world has entered the Urban Millennium, a period marked by the dominance of urbanization, with over half the global population now living in cities—a figure projected to reach 68% by 2050. This rapid urban growth, driven by economic opportunities, industrialization, and rural-to-urban migration, presents profound challenges and demands in infrastructure, housing and other buildings, environmental sustainability, social equity, and urban governance. As a result, cities are increasingly compelled to expand horizontally through urban sprawl, vertically through high-rise development, and internally by increasing urban density.
On the other hand, land scarcity, governments’ green initiatives, public pressure, and the need to conserve natural land are pushing urban development toward brownfield sites rather than untouched greenfield areas. While brownfields offer valuable opportunities for (re)development, they also present complex challenges, for instance, identifying contamination types and levels, determining suitable redevelopment uses, and ensuring alignment with the specific growth demands of a city. Therefore, redevelopment strategies must adhere to sustainability principles, in the pursuit of the possible best fit between what is feasible (re)development on a given brownfield site and what is needed to support sustainable urban growth.
With the nexus of land and urban development being at the backdrop, this Special Issue aims to entertain the generation of new inter- and cross-disciplinary knowledge around sustainable redevelopment of urban brownfield sites in conjunction with the spatial pressures of growing cities, while evading the shift from greenfield to brownfield development driven by land scarcity.
Contributions are invited regarding (but not limited to) land-use planning, brownfield types, contamination assessment, environmental risks and conservation, strategic spatial policies, economic viabilities, decision-making, (re)development types, and alike, while seeking integration and alignment of sustainability principles with the cross-over between brownfield (re)development and urban growth demands across diverse socio-ecological and spatial contexts.
Dr. Talib E. Butt
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- sustainability
- urbanization
- brownfield
- (re)development
- urban growth demands
- spatial planning
- risk assessment
- contaminated land
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