Landscapes for Human-Oriented Smart Cities

Dear Colleagues,

Cities are being reshaped by rapid urbanization, ecological stress, and digital transformation. In recent years, smart-city development has attracted growing attention, supported by advances in geospatial technologies, sensing systems, artificial intelligence, and data-driven urban management. These developments have created new opportunities for monitoring urban processes, improving public services, and informing planning decisions. At the same time, they raise a fundamental question: As cities become increasingly organized through information systems, algorithms, and machine-generated data, how can urban development continue to place human values at its center?

Much of the existing discussion on smart cities has focused on efficiency, optimization, and connectivity, while giving less attention to values, culture, lifestyles, interpersonal relationships, community, creativity, and everyday urban experience. In this context, people risk being reduced to components within a technical system rather than being recognized as the subjects of urban life and development. From the perspective of land and landscape research, however, cities are not only technical systems but also socio-ecological and cultural spatial systems shaped by human activities, environmental processes, and planning decisions.

Landscape is not merely the physical setting of smart urban development; it is also the spatial medium through which ecological relations, public life, place identity, and lived experience are organized and expressed. A human-oriented smart city, therefore, should be not only efficient and connected but also livable, inclusive, resilient, and ecologically grounded. Reconsidering smart urban development through the lens of landscape is thus both timely and necessary, as it allows us to ask not only how technologies can improve cities, but also how humanistic approaches to urban planning can remain meaningful in the smart-city era.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collect original research articles and review papers that critically examine how landscape perspectives, land use planning, and spatially informed technologies can contribute to the development of human-oriented smart cities without reducing urban life to a purely technocratic project. The Special Issue is particularly interested in contributions that explore how planning, design, and governance can reconnect smart urban development with human well-being, everyday life, ecological processes, place identity, and social values.

This topic is closely related to the scope of Land, as it addresses land systems, landscape change, spatial planning, ecological infrastructure, and human–environment interactions in the context of urban transformation. It also invites discussion of how land and landscape perspectives can provide a critical and constructive framework for evaluating the social, spatial, and ecological implications of smart-city development.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:

• Humanistic approaches to smart city planning and design;
• Landscape perspectives on smart urban development;
• Land use change and landscape transformation in smart cities;
• Urban form, spatial quality, and everyday experience;
• Public space, accessibility, social interaction, and urban livability;
• Ecological infrastructure, resilience, and nature-based solutions;
• Values, culture, creativity, and community in smart urban environments;
• Geospatial technologies, digital twins, and ai-enabled urban systems;
• Planning ethics, land governance, and strategies for people-centered urban futures.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Qing Lu
Prof. Dr. John Zacharias
Dr. Zhe Sun
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. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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.

• human-oriented smart cities
• humanistic urban planning
• urban landscapes
• land use planning
• landscape change
• territorial spatial planning
• ecological infrastructure
• AI-enabled urban systems
• digital twins
• urban livability
• nature-based solutions