Innovative Approaches and Strategies for Sustainable Urban and Regional Planning

Dear Colleagues,

Unprecedented population growth, the impact of climate change, and exposure to natural extreme events make urban sustainability a global priority. Urban centers foster a mixture of high-impact dynamics, and assessing their sustainability has become fundamental to counteracting progressive land consumption and the decreasing availability of environmental resources. This aspect is even more important in the transition zones between urban and natural areas. Here, phenomena such as peri- urbanization exacerbate existing problems related to the extensive use of space, the reliance on private mobility, and the fragmentation of natural areas.

In this context, cutting-edge technologies (such as AI-related methodologies), as well as ever-evolving concepts (nature-based solutions, green and blue infrastructures, etc.) that stress the integration between urban and natural areas, can provide the necessary background information to support strategic frameworks for sustainable urban and land use planning.

The scope of the issue is to collect research and approaches aimed at unveiling the relationship between urban shapes and sustainability. This includes contributions exploring the provision of both NBS and ecosystem services, their influence on quality of life, the development and use of new tools (such as machine learning techniques) and innovative monitoring activities. A key focus is on the sustainability of transformations occurring at the interface of urban and natural areas and their potential in designing future scenarios for the management of the built and natural environment.

References

• Falasca, F., & Marucci, A. (2024). Supporting Sustainable Development Goals through Regulation and Maintenance Ecosystem Services. Sustainability, 16(16), 6744
• Fiorini , Falasca F, Marucci A, Saganeiti L. (2022). Discretization of the Urban and Non-Urban Shape: Unsupervised Machine Learning Techniques for Territorial Planning. Applied Sciences, 12 (20), 10439, doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/app122010439.
• Marucci A., Fiorini L., Di Dato C., Zullo F., (2020). Marginality Assessment: Computational Applications on Italian Municipalities. Sustainability, 12(8), 3250; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12083250
• Di Dato, C., Pierantoni, I., Fiorini, L., Marucci, A., Sargolini, M. (2024). Characterization of Urban and Peri-Urban Areas in Umbria Region to Identify Their Possible Role in the Conservation of Natura 2000 Network. In: Marucci, A., Zullo, Fiorini, L., Saganeiti, L. (eds) Innovation in Urban and Regional Planning. INPUT 2023. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 463, pp 659–668. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54096-7_57
• Di Dato C., Fiorini L., Marucci A. (2025) Adaptation to climate changes and ecological transitions in urban contexts. In: Proceedings of 2025 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Living Environment. ISBN: 979-8-3315-0154-9.
• Pilogallo , Saganeiti L, Fiorini L., Marucci A. (2022). Ecosystem Services for Planning Impacts Assessment on Urban Settlement Development. In: Gervasi, O., Murgante, B., Misra, S., Rocha, A.M.A.C., Garau, C. Computational Scienceand Its Applications – ICCSA 2022 Workshops. ICCSA 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. vol. 13380, Springer, Cham. ISBN: 978-3-031- 10541-8,doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10542-5_17
• Falasca, Sette, C., & Montaldi, C. (2024). Addressing land use planning: A methodology for assessing pre-and post-landslide event urban configurations. Science of The Total Environment, 921, 171152.
• Di Dato, F. Falasca, A. Marucci (2023). Machine Learning Techniques for the Semiautomated Recognition of Urban and Peri-Urban configurations. In: Computational Science and Its Applications ICCSA 2023 Workshops. ICCSA 2023. LNCS, vol 14109. Springer, Cham.

Dr. Lorena Fiorini
Dr. Alessandro Marucci
Dr. Chiara Di Dato
Dr. Federico Falasca
Guest Editors

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• sustainable land planning
• urban and peri-urban areas
• machine learning techniques
• greening
• nature-based solutions
• ecosystem services