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The world over is becoming urbanized, and people are migrating to cities in large numbers in search of opportunities. The increased urbanization has posed challenges such as congestion, rising crime, and growing urban poverty. The governments respond by providing amenities such as schools, hospitals, and housing to meet to increase in demand for these facilities. However, there is a need for the provision of facilities that meets the expectations of the people, particularly on the proximity of amenities and bundles of utility-bearing housing characteristics. In an attempt to address the challenge mentioned, the study estimated the hedonic characteristics influencing the willingness to accept and willingness to pay for housing facilities in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Using a multiple linear regression model and artificial neural network, the study found out that properties with a bathroom, garage and large floor size have a higher value compared to properties without these facilities.When making decisions to acquire a property, buyers consider the availability of discounts and the prevailing property price. Overall, willingness to pay and accept decisions are mainly determined by location and the price at which homogeneous neighborhood properties were sold. Therefore, the study recommends that urban town planners and other housing authorities prioritize the construction of properties with larger floor areas, parking bays, and bathrooms using a cost-effective mechanism that makes the properties affordable to residents.

Background: The prevalence of obesity in English adults and children has reached critical levels. Obesity is determined by a wide range of factors including the environment and actions to reduce obesity prevalence requires a whole systems approach. The spatial planning system empowers local authorities to manage land use and development decisions to tackle obesogenic environments.

Methods: This research aimed to better understand what and how planning powers are being utilised by local authorities to help tackle population obesity. It reviewed literature on the six planning healthy weight environments themes. It identified what powers exist within the planning system to address these themes. It collated professionals’ perspectives on the barriers and opportunities through focus groups within local authorities and semi-structured interviews with national stakeholders.

Results: The research complements current research on the association between the environment and obesity outcomes, though methods employed by researchers in the literature were inconsistent. It identified three categories of planning powers available to both require and encourage those with responsibilities for and involvement in planning healthy weight environments. Through direct engagement with practitioners, it highlighted challenges in promoting healthy weight environments, including wider systems barriers such as conflicting policy priorities, lack of policy prescription and alignment at local levels, and impact from reduced professional and institutional capacity in local government.

Conclusions: The conclusions support a small but increasing body of research which suggests that policy makers need to ensure barriers are removed before planning powers can be effectively used to promote healthy weight environments as part of a whole systems approach. The research is timely with continuing policy and guidance focus on tackling obesity prevalence from national government departments and their agencies. This research was conducted as part of a Master of Research at Leeds Beckett University associated with a national whole-systems to obesity programme.

Even if there is a wealth of research highlighting the key role of values and cultural significance for heritage management and, defining specific interventions on built heritage, seldom the relation to their leading values and values hierarchy have been researched. How do values and interventions relate? What values trigger most and least interventions on heritage? How do these values relate and characterize interventions? And what are the values hierarchy that make the interventions on built heritage differ?

This paper conducts a systematic content analysis of 69 international doctrinal documents – mainly adopted by Council of Europe, UNESCO, and ICOMOS, during 1877 and 2021. The main aim is to reveal and compare the intervention concepts and their definitions, in relation to values. The intensity of the relationship between intervention concepts and values is determined based on the frequency of mentioned values per intervention.

There were three key findings. First, historic, social, and aesthetical values were the most referenced values in international doctrinal documents. Second, while intervention concepts revealed similar definitions and shared common leading values, their secondary values and values hierarchy, e.g. aesthetical or social values, are the ones influencing the variation on their definitions. Third, certain values show contradictory roles in the same intervention concepts from different documents, e.g. political and age values.

This paper explores a novel comparison between different interventions concepts and definitions, and the role of values. The results can contribute to support further research and practice on clarifying the identified differences.

Compared to younger and older generation migrants, middle-aged migrants in the diaspora seem to be more conflicted regarding their belonging. This paper aims to explore how middle-aged migrants in the diaspora define themselves in space and time.

The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork done among Malawian migrants (herein referred to as Lydiatians) settled at Lydiate informal settlement in peri-urban Zimbabwe.

The paper reveals that, while younger migrants have a “radical transnational stance”, and older migrants regard their place of settlement as their final home, middle-aged migrants prefer to maintain a “strategic dual sense of place” regarding their place of settlement in the diaspora. These middle-aged migrants can be entrepreneurs considering their current settlement as a strategic place for petty commodity trading or those who find informal settlements to provide needed opportunities for cheap housing as the migrants pursue work in the nearby towns.

The paper offers a deeper understanding of how middle-aged migrants navigate their sense of place and contribute to host nations by functioning as key resources, dynamizing local economies through entrepreneurial activities and labour provision for various industries. The implications of this research should encourage states to positively interact with migrants, leveraging their potential for societal and economic development.

The finding that migrants in the diaspora have a dual, strategic view of their settlements is fascinating, if not new. Before this, scholars presented migrants as transnational figures, successively moving to a better place, which finally becomes home. However, the data presented in this paper suggests that this characterization associating migrants with maintaining a “stable, sedentary, bounded and fixed perception of home” is oversimplified. This is because migrants can sometimes continue to cherish the idea of informal settlements in the diaspora as home, just as the migrants also entertain the nearby established towns as useful places in their life.

By merging good countryside and rural capitals frameworks, a model for reimagining the island's development is formulated, which is then applied to the female perspective to provide valuable insights from a group that is often marginalized in rural areas. As Croatian islands are highly tourism-oriented, this study finds it important to explore possibilities for future island development that can provide balanced and vibrant settlements on the islands.

The present paper synthesizes Shucksmith's (2018) model of a good countryside, which serves as a goal, with Gkartzios et al.'s (2022) capitals framework, which is viewed as a means of attaining a good countryside, specifically a good island. The research is delimited to the island of Brac, Croatia. By conducting interviews with female respondents, this study aims to capture the female perspective on envisioning potential futures of “good” island living, a perspective that is frequently underestimated despite its significant contributions to the creation of an ideal locale.

The results demonstrate that there is a substantial amount of socio-cultural rural capital that is leveraged to strengthen relatedness and rights as development objectives. However, low levels of economic, built and land-based rural capital pose challenges to achieving repair and re-enchantment, which are crucial for settlements that rely on tourism.

These findings bear immense implications for policymakers and planners, underscoring the imperative to account for the perspectives and needs of diverse social groups, including women, in the design and implementation of development strategies for islands. By doing so, a sustainable and equitable future, rich in tourism potential, can be cultivated on the island.

Managing biosphere reserves (BR) have become more challenging regarding the socio-cultural conflict between communities and BR administrators. For the past two decades, community participation (CP) has become the central narrative for BR management practices in Asia. This paper aims to set out to analyse the current literature because of the paucity of systematic reviews on CP in Asian BR. Also, it proffers possible solutions to enhance biosphere performance.

In total, 31 related studies were identified from the Scopus, Web of Science databases and materials from organisations in the field of practice of territorial conservation. Three themes emerged from the review – willingness to participate, encumbrances and possible solutions.

Factors that influence community willingness to participate in a BR, encumbrances facing the community and possible policy solutions to enhance CP in a BR in Asia were the three themes that emerged from the review. The factors that influence community willingness were categorised into the level of participants in education, perceived waste of time, no confidence of the outcome, okay with current management, land owned, household size and gender factors.

This paper’s recommendations were based on empirical literature reviewed systematically but do not compromise the robustness concerning BR management practices in Asia. It was established that to enrich the findings of this research, regional studies of CP in BR should be conducted, including primary source data using the mixed methods paradigm.

As part of the practical implications, recommendations were highlighted to enhance CP in BR. Also, the paper suggested that BR administrators should have two-way communication mechanisms, cross-sectoral participation and collaboration, implement locally-based solutions through full engagement of community members in decision-making.

This is probably the first systematic review paper on BR management practices in Asia. Filling the theoretical gap via systematic review was part of the significant contribution to CP in Asian BR.

The “unplannable” is a welcomed exception to the formal order of urban planning. This opinion article explores some examples of informal urbanism and discusses its ambiguous relationship to public space and unplanned activities in the city. The informal sector offers important lessons about the adaptive use of space and its social role. The article examines the ways specific groups appropriate informal spaces and how this can add to a city’s entrepreneurship and success. The characteristics of informal, interstitial spaces within the contemporary city, and the numerous creative ways in which these temporarily used spaces are appropriated, challenge the prevalent critical discourse about our understanding of authorised public space, formal place-making and social order within the city in relation to these informal spaces.

The text discusses various cases from Chile, the US and China that illustrate the dilemma of the relationship between informality and public/private space today. One could say that informality is a deregulated self-help system that redefines relationships with the formal. Temporary or permanent spatial appropriation has behavioural, economic and cultural dimensions, and forms of the informalare not always immediately obvious: they are not mentioned in building codes and can often be subversive or unexpected, emerging in the grey area between legal and illegal activities.

The study sought to examine the impacts of COVID-19 on tourism from the stakeholder perspective in the case of Famagusta town in Northern Cyprus.

Via a qualitative research approach, data are collected through face-to-face interviews from direct and indirect tourism stakeholders operating in Famagusta. A judgmental sampling strategy was employed to collect data from tourism stakeholders on the impacts of COVID-19 on tourism. Descriptive data analysis is engaged to report the results.

Results of the study showed that the novel coronavirus has hampered the tourism sector in Famagusta, Northern Cyprus. Indeed, as the globe suffered its effects in terms of economic gains, business and business closure. It has been the same with Famagusta, while a few private sectors positively gained (Internet and Technology), all other tourism-reliant sectors such as hotels, restaurants, travel agencies and the transport sector massively suffered as a result of the global lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic.

Given the ever-changing state of knowledge and scarcity of literature, the current study seeks to summarize what has been learned from previous crises and back it up with qualitative research including senior industry stakeholders.