Environmental Sustainability, Urban Planning, and Quality of Urban Life

Dear Colleagues,

One of the most serious changes we are currently experiencing is climate change, manifested not only in the notorious melting of glaciers but also severe droughts in some regions and devastating floods almost all over the world. Natural disasters in the form of prolonged droughts, floods, forest fires, amongst others have always been a part of human history, but today they differ in intensity and number; now, they affect virtually every country. In the search for solutions to this situation, one of the findings is that an effort must be made towards environmental sustainability in the form of maintaining the status quo in the first place and improving it in the steps that follow. Cities present another large change. The population of cities worldwide has exceeded 50%; in some countries, the urban population represents more than 90%. At the beginning of the 20th century, the capitals of developed countries were the largest cities in the world. Nowadays, the largest cities are in developing countries and China, with the exception of Tokyo. Megalopolises and metropolitan areas of millions of cities are a new phenomenon. The role of urban planners and local politicians is to improve the quality of life, but the current hedonic form of quality of life is not sustainable. This Special Issue focuses on three factors—environmental sustainability, urban planning, quality of urban life and the processes amongst them. We consider the concepts of environmental sustainability and quality of urban life together with urban planning as a set of urban–technical–economic–social processes as key drivers of the current development of cities. We warmly welcome papers aimed at conceptualising, analysing, and measuring two or all of these factors. We also warmly welcome papers focusing on the relationships between two of these factors or the relationships of all three. We are looking forward to theoretical papers and application-oriented papers on environmental sustainability in urban planning, the impact of environmental sustainability on the quality of life and on measuring the quality of urban life as an expression of residents' satisfaction with city life. We are open to research in terms of our focus on border issues such as environmental justice, urbanisation, deurbanisation, urban sprawl, urban liveability, quality of urban life in cities of different size categories or quality of urban life in socially excluded parts of cities.

Dr. František Murgaš
Guest Editor

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