Transition towards Low-Impact and Regenerative Human Settlements

Dear Colleagues,

In the rapidly urbanizing world, the aim of developing our cities and other human settlements to be more sustainable has become extremely important. While many technological solutions increase the energy and material efficiencies of cities, it has been suggested that the rate is not rapid enough to exceed the impact of the increasing consumption of goods and services on greenhouse gas emissions, resource consumption, and environmental degradation in general. In this Special Issue, we call for papers with visions that go beyond "doing less bad" to "doing more good" for the environment. The broad topic is the transition from current to low-impact and further to regenerative cities or and other human settlements and buildings. "Regenerative" refers here to actions, policies and technologies that have a net-positive impact on the environment.
 
We welcome especially assessments from the "footprint family", meaning carbon, material, biodiversity, ecological, etc., footprint assessments with life cycle perspective. We welcome assessments that depict the present situation, and empirical and modelling studies that include improvements to the state of the environment. For example, studies on carbon balance of human settlements are welcomed. We also encourage authors to address the special challenges and possible solutions to bridge the gap between regenerative buildings and city scale. We also welcome conceptual and theoretical papers, as well as methodological papers. We encourage authors to draw visionary policy implications that go beyond the current “green” or “sustainable" city and building  concepts that, often, actually present only minor improvements or rely only on relative, not absolute, improvement on the environment. The following list of topics is in no way exhaustive and is intended to inspire. Potential topics include:

- Regenerative human settlement concepts
- Carbon, material, biodiversity, ecological and other footprint assessments of present situation in various types of cities and other human settlements
- Carbon balance of human settlements
- Impacts of land-use change
- Carbon sequestration in the built environment
- Regenerative solutions in the built environment
- Carbon negative technologies in the built environment
- Assessment method development
- Environmental policy-making

Papers presenting research results with sound academic contributions and high societal impact potential are particularly welcomed.

Prof. Dr. Jukka Heinonen
Dr. Juudit Ottelin
Dr. András Reith
Guest Editors

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