Pathways to Sustainable Urban Form: Compact Cities Re-Imagined

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue aims to present contributions from well-known scholars and practitioners whose theoretical or practical work addresses urban form such as compactness, density, and sustainability at various scales from city planning and urban design to public space and architectural design. The intention is to take a more holistic approach to sustainable urban form by understanding the relationships between its social and the environmental dimensions, and by advancing the theory that underpins it.

Urban form, density, and compactness are complex and challenging issues affecting the liveability, resource-efficiency, and resilience of cities in many parts of the world, from Asia to Europe and America. Key concepts of compact urban form, density, and sustainable development embody the achievement of a good quality of life, and include issues of transport and mobility, “optimal” densities, mixed uses, healthy living, social and economic diversity, and support the use of appropriate technology, such as solar design, greening and re-naturing of cities, and a reduction in the use of finite resources.

At neighbourhood and maybe town or city levels, compactness, increased densities, improved public transport, walking, and cycling have entered into policy, and many examples are appearing on the ground. Autonomous vehicles using less space will affect urban design and form in new and interesting ways. At a larger scale, in most rapidly developing cities pressure pushes people out of centres creating sprawl, but denser sub-centres and intensification around transport hubs may form, increasing the importance of the networks and connectivity. The idea of the “compact city” appears an anomaly when faced with the largest scale of urban agglomerations, mostly in Asia, but developments of very rapid land transit that link cities together collapses time and distance, and may in theory make them more “compact”.

The objective of this Special Issue is to advance and “re-imagine” the ideas and theories behind sustainable urban forms, and to investigate over a range of urban contexts and scales how far the boundaries of theory can be embraced within the umbrella of the term “compact city”. Specifically, this Special Issue invites theoretical, empirical, and practice-based studies related to the keywords below, but other relevant topics will be considered.

Prof. Mike Jenks, PhD
Prof. Steffen Lehmann, PhD
Guest Editors

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