In urban planning, we often speak about making cities more sustainable, resilient, inclusive, walkable, green, smart, or liveable. These are important ambitions. They help us name the pressures cities face and the responsibilities planners carry. Yet they can also make the city sound like a technical system waiting to be corrected. If emissions are...

I came to my PhD topic, the ethics of architecture, through a slightly winding route. My academic background is in political science and political theory, with a particular interest in democratic theory and applied ethics. Within that broad field, however, I found myself drawn to a fairly narrow question: how do democratic societies relate, normati...

Collaborative housing (CH) is a commonly used umbrella term for all housing projects with at least some degree of collaboration between residents. Collaboration may refer to common ownership, building and design, activities, shared spaces, and more. Every project is unique. Some have individual apartments but lots of common space on-site, such as c...

Authors: Helen Nuo XU and Gehry Guo CUI Rethinking urban village regeneration: from a 'project' to a 'process' Speed is often the most striking impression many have of China's incredibly rapid urban development over the past four decades. An example is the 200,000 m2 Wanda Shopping Plaza, which can be completed from architectural design t...

Authors: Helen Nuo XU and Gehry Guo CUI  Urban villages emerged as a direct result of rapid urbanization when farmlands were purchased for green new development, leaving villages surrounded by modern high-rises. They are usually densely built and populated, accommodating migrants with low rent price and proximity to jobs and urban activit...

Authoritarian populist regimes have no use for technocrats who purport to serve the public good in the name of rationality. Where does that leave planners? Planners, like all technocrats, draw their authority from their specialized knowledge. Whether in government or the private sector, planners' know-how, experience and expertise is what gives the...

Guest author: Amine Mseddi (Szent Istvan University of Budapest) Architectural and urban recycling is seen as an economic and pragmatic approach. In an urban fa...

Guest author: Andrew Hoolachan, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge. The city of Dundee is Scotland’s most pro-independence city. The Scottish N...

Guest author: Anke Brons (Aeres University of Applied Sciences, Almere and Wageningen University) Note: This post was initially published on the blog of the The...

Authors: Manisha Sharma and Chandrima Mukhopadhyay Users of bus services in Delhi, India, have identified safety as a vital factor to deliver quality services a...

Guest authors: Damien Deville (Paul Valéry University) and Pierre Spielewoy (Rouen University & French Natural History Museum) This post is a free translati...

In the last decades cities have been responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions. In turn, the effects of climate change such as extreme natural ev...

Impacts There are many socio-economic impacts related to the increase of urban temperature exacerbated by the increase in the global warming. The implications o...

Physics of the UHI Phenomenon The energy balance ambient air-Earth surface is governed by energy gains, losses and storage and can be explained by the following...

The Vertical Profile of UHI Any change in the surface energy budget and in the surface temperatures produces effects on urban heat island (UHI) that can be noti...

The Two Dimension of the UHI UHI is mainly dependent on the modification of the urban energy fluxes and, as a consequence, on the synoptic conditions in urban a...

The urban population is increasing worldwide and the urban expansion or the increase in urban density can affect both the global and the local climate having co...

Stockholm is one of the fastest growing cities in Europe, with over one million new residents expected in the Swedish Capital in the next 25 years. The landscap...

Authors: Lorenzo Chelleri and Isabelle Anguelovski The concept of urban sustainability has been around for many decades, receiving the attention of the whole sp...

From the AESOP YA we want to share this article by African Centre for Cities (ACC) Director Edgar Pieterse, and his reflection on Prof. Watson contribution to p...