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The scope of this chapter is place and its identity in view of global changes. The ground for undertaking the topic is the belief that by conscious activity undertaken to protect the value of places we are capable of facing modern changes involving the homogenization of space.

Today we are witnessing a rapid destruction of the existing urban forms, leading to fading legibility of the city structure, destroying the state of subtle balance between space and place, and shaking the sense of identity of city inhabitants. The values of identity, legibility, and a traditional network of meanings and symbols are fading away. The space of flows supplants the space of places, evoking essential changes in the functional structure of cities, almost all over the world.

Is it possible to preserve the tradition and identity of place under globalization conditions? It is a challenge for architects, urban planners, decision-makers, investors, and inhabitants. One potential role of the urban planner is perceived as active participation in creating new qualitative social attitudes, as well as undertaking mediating, promotional, and educational activities. Tools that could be helpful in shaping a new model of place involve comprehensive discussion and education in the field of the value of space, shaping social awareness and grounds for social development. It may be concluded with some caution that such comprehensive discussion will contribute to raising the level of knowledge about the world and the sense of the value of space.

Judit Bodnar is an associate professor of sociology, anthropology, and history at the Central European University in Budapest. She is a U.S.-trained sociologist with a degree from Johns Hopkins University. The author of Fin de Millėnaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of urban life (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and co-editor of Critical urban studies (L’Harmattan, Budapest, forthcoming), she has written on cities, public space, urban theory, postsocialism, globalization, food, and alterglobalization movements. Her research and teaching interrogate larger themes such as modernity, capitalism, uneven development, and comparative thinking. She is working on a co-authored book that examines local histories of global urban restructuring through a comparative analysis of new housing in Chicago, Berlin, and Budapest.

The purpose of the chapter is twofold. First, it discusses the causes and characteristics of the current proliferation of rail station area redevelopment megaprojects around the globe, revealing them to be an important subset of the new generation of megaprojects discussed in this volume. Second, it offers a detailed and timely account of recent struggles surrounding “Stuttgart 21,” a massive, hugely controversial rail station redevelopment megaproject in Southern Germany, drawing lessons from the controversy over Stuttgart 21 for urban megaprojects more generally. This study is a qualitative case study analysis that involved interviews and document analysis. The experience of “Stuttgart 21” validates previous criticisms of megaprojects regarding transparency and public accountability in decision-making, environmental challenges, and cost-overruns. The political conflicts over “Stuttgart 21” are intimately tied to fundamental disagreements over future urban development and transportation policy, the costs and benefits of multibillion Euro megaprojects, and related democratic decision-making procedures. Rail stations emerge as an important, as-of-yet underexplored subset of urban megaprojects. Rail stations, especially those serving new high-speed rail corridors, are crucial development nodes within complex postindustrial urban–regional restructuring processes. But they also have a distinct character and historical identity. As the mass protests in Stuttgart show, they also clearly serve important identification functions in citizens’ lives.

The practical demonstrations and research which led to the preparation of this paper involved a combination of stakeholder engagement, policy debate and the practical demonstration and testing of autonomous vehicles. By adhering to a design approach which in centred on participation and human-centred engagement, the advent of autonomous vehicles might avoid many of the problems encountered in relation to conventional transport.

The research explored how a new and potentially disruptive technology might be incorporated in urban settings, through the lens of participation and problem-based design. The research critically reviews key strands in the literature (autonomous vehicles, social research and participatory design), with allusion to current case study experiments.

Although there are numerous examples of autonomous vehicles (AV) research concentrating on technical aspects alone, this paper finds that such an approach appears to be an unusual starting point for the design of innovative technology. That is, AVs would appear to hold the potential to be genuinely disruptive in terms of innovation, yet the way that disruption takes place should surely be guided by design principles and by issues and problems encountered by potential users.

The research carries significant implications for practice in that it advocates locating those socio-contextual issues at the heart of the problem definition and design process and ahead of technical solutions.

What sets this research apart from other studies concerning AVs was that the starting point for investigation was the framing of AVs within contexts and scenarios leading to the emergence of wicked problems. This begins with a research position where the potential uses for AVs are considered in a social context, within which the problems and issues to be solved become the starting point for design at a fundamental level.

Tehran’s health-care system is growing, yet it lacks emergency planning procedures. The premise of this study is that the urban environment around a hospital is just as robust as the hospital itself. This study aims to look at hospital resilience in an urban setting to see where it may be improved to keep the hospital operational during a disaster.

The urban resilience (UR) of Amir-Alam Hospital was analyzed in this study using a customized version of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s City Resilience Profiling Tool. The 34 indications were broken down into five categories.

The result revealed that the hospital’s UR score was 51.75 out of 100, indicating medium resilience. The results of this study enable the decision-makers to determine what measures they may take to improve the hospital’s resilience in terms of its surrounding urban context.

The originality of this research is based on the surrounding urban environment’s resilience as an integral part of hospital resilience.

This article is an editorial to JCHMSD's Volume 3, Issue 1 and aims to provide an overview to its selection of papers.

The article builds upon a previous editorial on the implementation of the new UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL). It discusses a research and training programme under development by the World Heritage Institute of Training and Research in Asia and the Pacific (WHITRAP) and Tongji University's Advanced Research Institute for Architecture and Urban Planning, in Shanghai, China, to help determining a strategy for the application of the HUL approach in China.

The HUL approach facilitates a structuring and priority setting of competing needs and demands for the integration of urban development and heritage management processes, which is perhaps most pressing in the current Chinese context of rapid and large‐scale urbanization. However, its precise meaning, and therefore its merit, is still poorly understood in China due to confusing conceptual foundations and interpretations, primarily related to the terminology of “cultural landscape”.

This research paper outlines a series of pertinent issues and questions as part of a critical path –a “road map”– for the application of the HUL approach, as promoted by UNESCO, in China and it outlines key areas for further research, in particular as concerns the development of a toolkit.

The purpose of this research paper is to explore the role and effectiveness of particular participation styles that affect the effectiveness of urban planning being integrated with disaster risk reduction (DRR) practices.

This research was conducted using a heuristic approach to the examination of urban planning and DRR practices focussing particularly upon citizens’ participation in four case studies internationally: the UK floods in 2007; Hurricane Katrina in the USA in 2005; wildfires of 2009 in Victoria, Australia; and Swiss avalanche prevention and preparedness. Desktop research was conducted to analyse cases and identify key findings, confirmed and augmented by interviews with relevant specialists in each country through semi-structured interviews.

The research reveals some similarities across all four cases studied. It appears that urban planning and DRR approaches, particularly those with a regulatory outcome and based on highly technical tests, are common. Further, it is apparent in the cases studied that circumstances where deeper technical knowledge and/or self-interest are strong factors, that informing and sometimes consulting styles are the most appropriate. While the scope of the paper means that this principle cannot be widely applied, there is a need to investigate these issues further.

The heuristic and inductive nature of this research limits the potential for in-depth analyses of the case studies, but rather provides a base for future research in this area, which currently has limited literature.

This study provides a wide base for future research and partially addresses the gap in the literature on the topic of integration of urban planning and DRR with a focus on the community involvement in it.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the “knowledge city” spatial socio-economic imaginary used in the post-earthquake city of L’Aquila, Italy, to promote its socio-economic redevelopment.

The paper counters primary and secondary data with the expected qualities of a knowledge city. The analysis is supported by the literature review on knowledge-cities and post-disaster redevelopment, local and national documentation review, on-site observations and an inquiry of the case of the Gran Sasso Science Institute, the leading project towards the implementation of the knowledge-city agenda through interviews with key actors and a survey among its researchers.

Post-disaster realities and path-dependency leave little room for a positive path-shaping redevelopment trajectory related to a knowledge-city urban archetype. This vision promotes materialism and intellectualism from local, national and international stakeholders; however, the city lacks specific urban qualities to attract and maintain highly skilled labour and investments, while negative socio-economic trends still continue a decade after the earthquake.

The city’s post-disaster recovery and redevelopment contain certain degrees of inertia. The early stage of it, the lack of certain secondary data, and the focus of the paper on specific indicators limit the opportunity for stronger reasoning.

The analysis reveals that the redevelopment vision of the knowledge city was hastily adopted. The mismatch between reality and expectations highlights the need for post-disaster territories to avoid overestimation of their capabilities and adjusts their redevelopment strategies to local characteristics adopting modest future projections.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new index of social vulnerability (SV), based on local level data [statistical blocks (SBs)]. This same methodology was applied before at the municipal level, which is a level of analysis that under-evaluates local spots of high SV, by one side, and generalizes the coverage of support capacity equipment and infrastructure. The geographical level of detail of the input data allows to overcome those limitations and better inform infra-municipal risk practitioners and planners.

The assessment of SV in this paper adopts an inductive approach. The research context of this conceptual and methodological proposal derived from the need to operationalize the concept of SV as a planning tool. This approach required to distinguish between the components of criticality and support capability, as their assessment provides knowledge with distinct applications in risk management. The statistical procedure is based on principal components analysis, using the SB as the unit of analysis.

Support capability acts as a counter-weight of criticality. This understanding is well illustrated in the mapping of each component and the final score of SV. The methodological approach allowed to identify the drivers of criticality and support capability in each SB, aiding decision-makers and risk practitioners in finding the vulnerability forcers that require more attention (public or private social equipment, housing policies, emergency anticipatory measures, etc.).

An original approach to SV assessments is the consideration of the components of criticality and support capability. The results allow for the definition of adapted and specific strategies of risk mitigation and civil protection measures to distinct types of risk groups and by different stakeholders and risk practitioners. By predicting the impact and the recovery capacity of communities, the results have applicability in several fields of risk governance as, for example, risk communication and involvement, social intervention (health, education and housing), emergency response, contingency planning, early warning and spatial planning.