This book gathers the proceedings of the INPUT2023 Conference on ‘Innovation in Urban and Regional Planning.’ The 12th International Conference INPUT was held at the University of L'Aquila, Italy, on September 6–8, 2023, and brought together international scholars in the fields of planning, civil engineering and architecture, ecology, and social science, to strengthen the knowledge on nature-based solutions and to enhance the implementation and replication of these solutions in different contexts. The book represents the state of the art of modeling and computational approaches to innovations in urban and regional planning, with a transdisciplinary and borderless character to address the complexity of contemporary socio-ecological systems and following a practice-oriented and problem-solving approach. Computational tools, technologies, data, mathematical models, and decision support tools are explored for providing innovative spatial planning modeling methodologies.

In their book, the authors introduce the topic of urban development from a systems (theoretical) perspective and provide explanatory approaches, tips and methodological instructions for dealing with urban complexity. Knowing full well that this sometimes amounts to squaring the circle, the authors draw on applied systemic approaches and systematically couple these with epistemological currents that can be assigned to Luhmann's systems theory. The social understanding of this theory of social systems represents a very good starting point for understanding urban development and urban complexity. From this perspective, urban development can be seen as a process in which organisations and individuals with their own expectations and perspectives are involved, in which contradictions and conflicts seem inevitable and the future cannot be clearly predicted. Decisions in cities and municipalities are therefore always associated with risks, irritations and unexpected consequences. With the Potsdam lodestar approach, Rolfes and Wilhelm present a multidimensional approach to managing urban development processes.

This rich and accessible volume maps current debates within the expanded field of image-based, vertical analysis. With contributions from astronauts, artists, architects, sociologists, urbanists, visual culture theorists, geographers, anthropologists and more the book signals new moves in inter and multidisciplinary research on visual-vertical thinking and related practices within the social sciences, humanities and across the arts.

The book explores current characteristics of the urban built environment in view of possible future transformations. A cross-reading analysis of existing public social housing buildings is proposed, based on the investigation of their architectural, structural, and energetic characteristics. The study aims to provide an integrated approach that captures the link between typology, construction, and energy demands, offering a key to understanding the main critical issues and transformation readiness. It focuses on large-scale interventions composing public social housing stocks, realized during the second half of the twentieth century. More than other public interventions, such building stocks clearly lack in meeting current housing needs such as modern apartment architectural layout, energy and structural regulations, and social mix. However, due to their numerical presence, strategical and widespread distribution across urban areas, and transformability, these buildings can be the target for future strategic regeneration projects. In particular, the book thoroughly investigates the social housing estate constructed in Rome (Italy) after the approval in 1964 of the first urban economic and social housing plan.

​This book addresses the problem of creation and reproduction processes of contemporary urban communities, as well as cultural mechanisms and factors of these processes. Rejecting both the environmental determinism, and cultural reductionism of community studies, the book assumes that the postmodern city is a space of diverse urban communities that go far beyond the traditional concept of neighbourhood as well as personal and imagined communities, and thus proposes to comprehend urban community as social practice embedded in urban space. The book applies the Theory of Social Practice and the Theory of Scenes and develops the concept of socio-cultural opportunity structures in order to explain how cultural practices of individuals and symbolic dimensions of territory interact, leading to (re)production of various forms of urban community. It is assumed that culture in general and symbolic meanings of territory in particular, play a crucial role in the process of (re)production of urban communities, that this process takes place in collective cultural consciousness and is mediated by territorially embedded cultural practices of individuals. The book overcomes theoretical gaps in classical community studies and develops a new perspective on urban communal processes based on the analysis of social practices in urban cultural scenes.

​This book provides a unique perspective on urban mobility focusing on past challenges and future trends. The book enables discussions of pathways towards sustainable and people-centred urban mobility building on existing concepts and introducing novel methods and consideration of future research. In particular, the book provides an overview of trends, design methods, and projects combining foresight and agent-based modelling to better integrate active mobility in Mobility-as-a-Service, assess impacts of automated vehicles in Paris, and compare multiple solutions in Cairo. The book provides a range of multidisciplinary concepts and methods that will be invaluable to both researchers in the field and students taking relevant courses.

This book examines the extent to which the environment is addressed in the sustainability plans of Canadian cities. It assesses if and to what extent select leading environmental priorities are addressed in the sustainability plans of sixteen Canadian cities, followed by analysis of efforts towards each priority. It scores and ranks cities against each environmental priority and highlights what makes some cities lead and others lag in environmental sustainability.