Urban Planning and Social Well-being

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to invite you to submit your latest research in this Special Issue of Sustainability. Urban planning and social well-being is a challenging topic and stimulating real problem to be solved. It is also a polyhedral theme that requires the attention of all of us. We need different disciplines, cross disciplinary studies, adventurist ideas towards the future of sustainable urban planning that implicates the well-being of urban population.

Hundreds of cities are planned or built in the world. Cities are places with concentrated people with complex problems of livability related with density and climate changing conditions. Cities are spaces where the rise of inequality is clearer than in any other places. Dealing with environment, there is no doubt that cities concentrate enormous amount of waste, enormous amount of emissions; but, otherwise, cities and urbanization provides a more efficient way to live. Concentrating people in space allows delivering services at scale with fewer resources, concentrating recycling and reusing. Besides, there are enormous innovations coming from cities. Unfortunately, that’s not been the model of urban growth; it has been about consumption increasing, areas of disparity where the social fabric has been cut off and the greenery is inexistent. The modern environmental approach demonstrated little capacity to problem solving.

Changes are in order mainly to dramatically reduce cities’ dependency on fossil fuels, boost the deployment of renewable energies, reintroduce water to the hydrological cycle and make sewage reprocessing. To transform cities into livable habitats a common goal should engage citizens, governments and public and private sectors. Cities and urban areas are major contributors to diminishing the natural capital of the planet and eroding its resilience. Nevertheless, sustainable urbanization has the potential to help in a new era of well-being, resource efficiency and economic growth.

According to UN, addressing the impacts of climate change in urban places is a strategic issue that requires a comprehensive and sustainable approach. Building cities resilience is about building the right kind of infrastructure, to make sure that people are in places which are not more vulnerable, and are not in fragile areas, ensuring people’s access to essential services. It is about insuring people living in urban areas the capacity to deal with emerging problems of air and water pollution and a multitude of other environmental challenges. Consequently, rethinking about the model, the benefits of urbanization can be used as a wealth of resources much more efficiently.

Therefore, this Special Issue provides a forum to discuss and identify new trends and developments in urban planning and social well-being, with an emphasis on sustainability.

Prof. Dr. Montserrat Pallares-Barbera
Guest Editor

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. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2400 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.