Designing the Climate-Sensitive City: Urban Design and Planning for Urban Resilience

Dear Colleagues,

As cities confront intensifying heat, water scarcity, flooding, biodiversity loss, and widening socio-spatial inequalities, questions of land, form, and landscape have become central to climate adaptation. Climate risk is not only a matter of infrastructure and technology; it is also produced and mediated by settlement patterns, land-use decisions, public-space design, ecological systems, and everyday spatial practices. Within this context, the “climatic-sensitive city” offers a timely lens through which to rethink how spatial planning, urban design, and landscape architecture can shape more resilient, healthy, and liveable urban environments. This agenda is especially urgent in rapidly urbanizing and climate-exposed regions, including arid, tropical, and coastal contexts, where the design of streets, blocks, open spaces, vegetation networks, and development controls directly affects comfort, health, exposure, and long-term adaptability.

This Special Issue seeks original research articles, review papers, and interdisciplinary contributions that explore how climate-responsive planning, land management, urban design, and landscape-based strategies can advance urban resilience across different geographies and scales. The topic addresses the reciprocal relationships among land transformation, ecological performance, settlement patterns, public realm, and governance. We are particularly interested in submissions that bridge territorial, metropolitan, neighbourhood, and site-specific perspectives, and that connect design inquiry with policy, performance assessment, implementation, and governance. Contributions may be empirical, comparative, methodological, speculative, or practice-based, provided they offer clear insight into how land and design can support adaptation, mitigation, resilience, and more just urban futures.

We welcome contributions from scholars and practitioners in planning, urban design, landscape architecture, environmental design, geography, and related fields.

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

• Climatic-sensitive architecture, urbanism, land use, and urban morphology
• Heat-resilient public space, walkability, and outdoor thermal comfort
• Urban Microclimate-informed planning, environmental simulation, and digital decision-support tools
• Retrofitting existing urban fabrics and climate mitigation and adaptation in arid, tropical, and coastal cities
• Climate justice, health, vulnerability, and governance frameworks for resilient urban development
• Blue-green infrastructure, landscape-based adaptation, and nature-based solutions
• Landscape architecture, urban ecology, and open-space systems
• Parks, streetscapes, campuses and waterfronts as climatic infrastructure
• Biodiversity-sensitive design and habitat connectivity
• Water-sensitive urban design and resilient landscape infrastructure

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

Dr. Simona Azzali
Prof. Dr. Agatino Rizzo
Dr. Constantinos Vassiliades
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-anonymized 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.

• climatic-sensitive cities
• urban resilience
• climate mitigation and adaptation
• climate-responsive urban design
• urban microclimate
• blue-green infrastructure
• nature-based solutions
• heat adaptation
• landscape architecture
• ecological urbanism
• public realm design