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Cities lying within conflict zones have continually faced hardships of both war aftermath and long-term sustainable reconstruction. Challenges have surpassed the typical question of recovery from post-conflict trauma, preserving urban heritage and iconic elements of the built environment, to face issues of critical decision making, rebuilding effectiveness and funding mechanisms, leading to time-consuming processes that lack adequate consistent long-term management. Some approaches have explored methods of effective long-term city reconstruction management but have not fully developed comprehensive approaches that alleviate the management of such complex processes. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors devise an approach for the smart management of post-conflict city reconstruction. The authors focus on evaluation, strategic planning, reconstruction projects and implementation. The authors integrate building information modeling and geographic/geospatial information systems in a platform that allows for real-time analysis, reporting, strategic planning and decision making for managing reconstruction operations and projects among involved stakeholders including government agencies, funding organizations, city managers and public participants.

The approach suggested a smart management system for the reconstruction process of post-conflict cities. Implementing this system was shown to provide a multi-objective solution for post-conflict city reconstruction based on its interlinked modules.

Results may lack generalizability and require testing on several cases to provide rigorous findings for different case studies.

Implications include developing smart management systems for use by city managers and government authorities in post-conflict zones, as well as bottom-up decision making by including participant citizens especially populations in the diaspora.

The approach offers an integrated platform that informs city reconstruction decision makers, allowing for strategic planning tools for efficient planning, monitoring tools for continuous management during and after reconstruction, and effective platforms for communication among all stakeholders.

The destruction of armed confrontations – ranging from chronic armed conflicts to full-scale wars – leads to enormous loss of human lives and causes wide-scale devastation. They also leave deep and lasting traumas in the minds of those whose lives are torn apart because of a conflict. Memorialisation of conflict-affected sites plays an invaluable part in post-trauma recovery and can contribute to the reconciliation of different groups involved in a conflict as these sites are representatives of communities' collective memory, identity and a source of unity and resilience. This paper aims to investigate post-trauma recovery and reconciliation processes through the phenomena of memorialisation. It aims to answer how and if the memorialisation of sites of pain can contribute to the recovery and reconciliation of affected communities and serve as examples for other people around the world.

The documentation of such processes and the lessons learnt can offer valuable information for conducting similar exercises in other settings ravaged by a conflict. To achieve this, a review of literature on trauma, memory, memorialisation and difficult heritage was conducted, while the memorialisation processes from different cases such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1939–1945), Beirut (1975–1990) and Sarajevo's Vijecnica and Mostar Bridge (1992–1995) were analysed.

It was identified that the potential of memorialisation for post-trauma recovery and reconciliation is vast. However, if these processes can “heal” or “hurt” depend largely on who the stakeholders are; how the site and events are interpreted and presented; how pre/post-conflict relationships and dynamics are harnessed; how symbolic meanings (old and new) are [re]interpreted; the spatial-temporal nature of the site and those interacting with it; and the intended and perceived messages. Altogether, memorialisation of conflict-affected sites is a political and continuous process that should take into consideration all those directly and indirectly involved, the dynamics between them and all the symbolic meanings acquired and attributed to the site.

The study critically explores frameworks of memorialisation and their impact on both the built environment and communities. It contributes to the wider discussion of difficult heritage memorialisation and approaches to reflect on sites and cities emerging from crises such as conflict.

Given the complexity of a post-conflict environment, the restaurant sector needs to be analyzed not just from the economic perspective. This paper aims to identify the diverse macroenvironmental and managerial factors underlying restaurant failures in Lebanon. The authors hope that this effort may help increasing restaurant success rates in other post-conflict settings.

The aim of this paper is to explain how macroenvironmental pressures influence the restaurant business and which managerial factors are most critical in a post-conflict context. The authors adopted a qualitative method by conducting face-to-face, semi-structured interviews.

The findings show that restaurant failures in a competitive and uncertain post-conflict environment were caused mainly by a snowball of internal organizational factors related to bad management, poor human resource management policies, inefficiency and fraud. Internal organizational factors can all be associated with human mistakes and bad decisions, including excessive initial investment, expensive decoration, inability to manage monthly expenses, bad communication and market research.

This study contributes to the literature regarding restaurant failures in post-conflict regions and presents results that are expected to help managers in family- and non-family-owned businesses to enhance their decision-making process.

This study aims to investigate the social and affective impacts of inviting residents of a socially divided, post-war city to “play tourist” for a day, exploring their own backyards with a new intentionality and perspective.

This qualitative research within a transformative worldview uses a creative, place-based approach of role-playing based upon principles of participatory action research.

While each tour was unique, participants’ insights reflected three common themes: shifts in observations and perceptions of place arising from the intentionality of the “tourist” lens, a sense of freedom created by the touristic research opportunity, and the varying abilities of tourism experiences to help build empathy or awareness in a post-conflict setting.

The inventive research approach allows for a unique examination of local tourism-styled explorations, a subject of growing interest that has largely been overlooked in literature, while paying special attention to ways in which a history of conflict may manifest in contemporary urban tourism experiences.

Northern Ireland (NI) has pervasively been a fragile and often disputed city-regional nation. Despite NI's slim majority in favour of remaining in the European Union, de facto Brexit, post-pandemic challenges and the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) have revealed a dilemma: people of all political hues have started to question aspects of their own citizenship. Consequently, this chapter suggests an innovative approach called ‘Algorithmic Nations’ to better articulate its emerging/complex citizenship regimes for this divided and post-conflict society in which identity borders and devolution may be facilitated through blockchain technology. This chapter assesses implications of this dilemma for a city-regionalised nation enmeshed within the UK, Ireland and Europe: NI through Belfast, its main metropolitan hub. The chapter explores digital citizenship in NI by applying ‘Algorithmic Nations’ framework particularly relating to intertwined (1) cross-bordering, (2) critical awareness, (3) digital activism and (4) post-pandemic realities and concludes with three dilemmas and how ‘Algorithmic Nations’ framing could better integrate NI's digital citizenship.

The value assessment process of the built heritage is a multipart procedure that includes diverse aspects with overlapping requirements. This process requires various measures to obtain better results, making it a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) process. In post-disaster cases, a management system is required to promptly evaluate the degree of risk and damage and to set the preservation priorities in order to effectively supervise and protect the heritage places. MCDM is utilized for configuring and solving decision and planning problems encompassing multiple criteria, to assist decision-makers.

This paper suggests an approach as a tool to be used in the development of the Built Heritage Record for Mosul Old City. It proposes a D&C technique as an MCDM effectual tool for solving multifaceted problems of heritage significance assessment process in post-conflict cities, adopting the conservation of the traditional houses of Mosul Old City as a case study.

The research results showed the need for a method to solve the complexity of the decision-making problem regarding the process of determining the value and significance of heritage buildings and sites in the old city of Mosul, and how to develop a methodology to facilitate decision-making within databases related to such a multi-criteria issue.

For an effective judgment of the expert or participant in the evaluation process, and to contribute to the decision-making more objectively, exploiting digital management programs including an interactive user interface with the ability to share on the Internet is the focal next intention of the project.

The paper shows that by using specific software, a database for heritage places of the old city of Mosul could be generated to apply the proposed system. The expert can utilize the software to calculate and define the total value of the place automatically according to the entered data.

The purpose of this paper is to present young people's attitudes to peace‐walls in Belfast and whether they feel that these peace‐walls should be temporary or permanent structures.

The methodology is based on questionnaire responses from 125 young people between the ages of 14 and 15 from six schools located in areas in Belfast where Catholics and Protestants live side by side yet apart. The paper is also based on their responses to photo prompts, focus group discussions and images of peace‐walls drawn by some of the young people.

The young people produced six discourses on peace‐walls in Belfast and these are outlined in the paper.

The paper endorses the necessity of incorporating young people's views of peace‐walls in Belfast as a prelude to finding ways in which to challenge taken‐for‐granted assumptions about the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The paper is original in that it addresses the neglect of young people's views on peace‐walls in Belfast and contributes to further understanding of the importance of capturing young people's spatial strategies in divided cities.

This paper critically analysed 195 articles with the objectives of providing a clear understanding of the current City Information Modelling (CIM) implementations, identifying the main challenges hampering the uptake of CIM and providing recommendations for the future development of CIM.

This paper adopts the PRISMA method in order to perform the systematic literature review.

The results identified nine domains of CIM implementation including (1) natural disaster management, (2) urban building energy modelling, (3) urban facility management, (4) urban infrastructure management, (5) land administration systems, (6) improvement of urban microclimates, (7) development of digital twin and smart cities, (8) improvement of social engagement and (9) urban landscaping design. Further, eight challenges were identified that hinder the widespread employment of CIM including (1) reluctance towards CIM application, (2) data quality, (3) computing resources and storage inefficiency, (4) data integration between BIM and GIS and interoperability, (5) establishing a standardised workflow for CIM implementation, (6) synergy between all parties involved, (7) cybersecurity and intellectual property and (8) data management.

This is the first paper of its kind that provides a holistic understanding of the current implementation of CIM. The outcomes will benefit multiple target groups. First, urban planners and designers will be supplied with a status-quo understanding of CIM implementations. Second, this research introduces possibilities of CIM deployment for the governance of cities; hence the outcomes can be useful for policymakers. Lastly, the scientific community can use the findings of this study as a reference point to gain a comprehensive understanding of the field and contribute to the future development of CIM.

The UK city of culture (UKCoC) scheme developed out of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 and is synonymous with urban renewal. The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges of bidding for this scheme.

The authors conducted semi-structured telephone interviews with bid team members from four out of the five short-listed cities for the 2021 award. Respondents were situated across the country and, at the time, finalising their Stage 2 bids. Thematic analysis was conducted to analyse the responses.

The UKCoC scheme is a top-down scheme which is delivered “in place”. The danger of the top-down vision is that local people cannot often conceptualise what it might mean within the context of their own locality. The findings here suggest that bid team members are attempting to do this despite obvious time pressures. The research presented here suggests that cities are reconciling the top-down, criteria-led nature of the scheme with a real reflection on how to make that work for their locality which is distinctive.

The UKCoC scheme has proved to galvanise communities to reflect on the nature of their places and think about what makes them unique in comparison to the other bidding cities. The bidding teams acknowledge the challenges of bidding but there is a sense that competing is worth the investment.

This paper offers a unique insight into a recent competitive placemaking scheme and reflects on how placemaking can potentially be reconciled as both top-down and place-based.

Commemorating the 15th year anniversary of discourse, knowledge dissemination in architecture and urbanism through the contributions published in Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research, since March 2007, this article aims to capture, unpack and categorize the key content of published research outputs during the last five years into knowledge spaces.

While referring to key statistics of various recognized databases in order to highlight the journal growth, development and performance, the approach to the analysis is inspired by Crysler's Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism and the Built Environment. This is established through a preliminary conceptual content analysis that enables the development of specific content categories representing knowledge spaces based on the overall contributions to the journal since its inception in 2007 and then mapping the recent contributions, developed over the past five years (2017–2021), to these knowledge spaces. The thrust of the analysis is to instigate a structured understanding of Archnet-IJAR role in the development and dissemination of knowledge in architecture and urbanism.

The examination of the content and the analysis reveal two broad categories of knowledge spaces: established and evolving. Established knowledge spaces are recognized in terms of theorizing architectural and urban production; the public realm and assessment of designed environments; housing, the informal and the vernacular; urban heritage and historic environments; and architectural and urban politics. Evolving knowledge spaces were acknowledged in terms of architectural education and design pedagogy; collaborative planning and community design; architectural and urban sustainability and resilience; health, wellbeing and engaging with nature; and COVID-19 spatial and pedagogical implications. Characterized by clear definition and at the same time transparent borders, the identified knowledge spaces have the potential of generating further possibilities for future knowledge spaces.

In addition to a holistic analysis based on the scrutiny of contributions as they progressed from submissions to reviews to publishing, future work would involve more systematization, in-depth engagement with metadata and should benefit from IT applications and data mining software packages.

This article is regarded as a cognizance platform and an enabling mechanism for researchers and future contributors to identify the unique particularities of their research, the nature of the content they aim to develop and the way in which that content may contribute to one or more knowledge spaces.

Establishing an understanding of the knowledge spaces which represent contributions published in Archnet-IJAR, the knowledge spaces identified demonstrate diversity and plurality; diversity in ontological interpretations of the nature of reality and plurality and pluri-epistemology in terms of how methods are pursued and the way in which such interpretations are developed, recorded, documented and communicated. These are knowledge spaces of possibilities and anticipation of growth, evolution and development.