Land Use Planning and Smart City Design

Dear Colleagues,

Land-use planning has a long tradition in geography, urban and regional economics, environmental management, urban architecture, transportation science and physical planning. In recent years, a new concept has come to the fore in the urban field due to the emergence of wealth of scientific publications on the conceptualization, operationalization and technological implementation of smart circular cities/regions. The main challenge of such cities and regions is not the presence of advanced digital technology, but the exploitation of the many benefits of human-centred digital technology for increased urban performance in several dimensions (e.g., social, cultural, economic, well-being, accessibility, safety, participatory, etc.), fostering co-creation and participatory approaches for smart circular city/region development.

One of the prominent fields where digital technology may make a difference is land use planning. In the past years an avalanche of new analysis techniques, planning approaches and citizens’ participatory modes has evolved. At present, urban and territorial land use planning is hardly affective, if it is not supported by advanced human-centred digital technology. It should be added that 2D top-down land use planning is increasingly substituted for 3D and participatory analytical methods which are often even more extensively based on advanced geo-science approaches.

This Special Issue of Land seeks to publish high-quality scientific contributions regarding land-use planning and advanced digital technology in the context of smart circular city/region development concepts and practices. It will contain theoretical/methodological advances and operational and applied studies from both the developed and developing part of the world. This Special Issue covers many disciplinary fields ranging from architecture to computer science, from political science to geo-design, from geography to urban planning, from cultural tourism to circular urban/regional development, etc.

Dr. Antonia Gravagnuolo
Dr. Karima Kourtit
Prof. Dr. Peter Nijkamp
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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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.