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Based on the new requirements of the rapid development of the national urbanization, planning adaptability and dynamic variability in the process of urban planning should be improved, which will become the focus of planning and design. Therefore, in this paper, the operating mechanism of transformation and upgrading of urban planning based on game theory was proposed. Firstly, the concept and development background of urban planning and operation were expounded, and the game theory was used to analyze the operating mechanism of urban planning; then, the formulation of urban planning based on the operation concept of urban planning was analyzed from the aspects of urban planning system, the overall development principle, the overall plan and the detailed planning; in addition, by taking the planning and design of the upgrading of a city as an example, the planning of blocks, urban parks and buildings and so on was achieved.

This paper aims to propose the concept of resilience as a way of aligning these disciplines. Theories of recovery planning and urban design theories have a common interest in providing for the health and safety of urban communities. However, the requirements of safe refuge and recovery after a disturbance, such as an earthquake, are sometimes at odds with theories of urbanism.

The paper analyses the data from two case studies: the earthquake and fire of 1906 in San Francisco and the Chile earthquake of 2010. It uses a set of resilience attributes already embedded in the discourse of urban theory to evaluate each city’s built environment and the way people have adapted to that built environment to recover following an earthquake.

The findings suggests that resilience attributes, when considered interdependently, can potentially assist in the design of resilient cities which have an enhanced capacity to recover following an earthquake.

They also suggest that the key to the successful integration of recovery planning and urban design lies in a shift of thinking that sees resilience as a framework for the design of cities that not only contributes significantly to the quality of everyday urban life but also can be adapted as essential life support and an agent of recovery in the event of an earthquake.

The sheer complexity and unpredictability characterising cities challenges the adequacy of existing disciplinary knowledge and tools in urban design and highlights the necessity to incorporate explicitly the element of change and the dimension of time in the understanding of, and intervention on, the form of cities. To this regard the concept of resilience is a powerful lens through which to understand and engage with a changing world. However, resilience is currently only superficially addressed by urban designers, and an explicit effort to relate elements of urban form to resilience principles is still lacking. This represents a great limit for urban designers, as the physical dimension of cities is the matter they work with in the first place. In this paper, we combine established knowledge in urban morphology and resilience theory. We firstly look at resilience theory and consistently define five proxies of resilience in urban form, namely diversity, redundancy, modularity, connectivity and efficiency. Secondly, we discuss the configuration of, and interdependencies between, several constituent elements of the physical city, as defined in urban morphology and design, in light of the mentioned five proxies. Finally, we conduct this exploration at five scales that are relevant to urban morphology and design: plot, street edge, block, street and sanctuary area / district.

Historic districts are faced with inadequate features protection and landscape destruction in the process of accelerating urban construction, urban design focuses on how places function in addition to how they look, this theory is suitable for the protection of historical districts. At the present stage, the traditional urban design of historical districts has a series of problems, such as uncomprehensive research about characteristics, incomplete workflow and the lack of transformation route from design scheme to implementation, the main reason is that there is a mismatch between the setting goal and planning implementation. Urban design based on “Action planning” has the characteristics of comprehensive research contents, specific implementation plans and complete workflow, it arranges the workflow with four stages, including design preparation, design planning, design implementation and design evaluation, which is a new exploration and attempt to turn traditional blueprint-oriented into action-oriented. Urban design of North Shuncheng Lane Historic Districts in Xi'an city used action planning as a concept and established an framework including “identify development status and problems—construct action target and strategy—determine action projects and specific plans—improve and evaluate the results”, to implement design ideas into practice and to guide the protection of historic districts. Above all, action-oriented planning is considered the key to the development of historic districts.

Sustainable urbanism is the study of both cities and the practices to build them, which focusses on promoting their long-term viability by reducing consumption, waste and harmful impacts on people and place while enhancing the overall well-being of both people and place. This paper analyses the implications of adopting sustainable urbanism principles and developing resilient places with Abuja as the area of focus to tackle the highlighted issues.

The paper is based on qualitative research which is centred on an extensive literature review and archival retrieval of historical documents. This includes the emergence of urbanism, sustainable urbanism definition and current issues surrounding its adaptation. The paper also focusses on a case study area in the capital city of Abuja, Nigeria which is currently undergoing massive urban development. Interviews are conducted with academics (13), practitioners (12) and government officials (10) making a total of 35 participants.

The main findings will create an understanding of the definition of sustainability and sustainable urbanism with a special focus on Abuja city. It was realised from the interviews that sustainable urbanism in broad terms encompasses economic, social, and environmental sustainability, and that these dimensions vary across different contexts even in the developing world. Also, sustainability can be achieved through deploying the right combination of measures, policies, assessment tools, sustainability assessment, good governance, and training/education and incentives.

By reviewing the selected studies which explore a wide range of disciplines and research areas, and conducting this qualitative research, this paper shares insights into how sustainability and sustainability urbanism can be achieved in the development of urban spaces in Abuja environs.

This paper provides a critical review of “Defensible Space” (Newman, 1973) and traces the development of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) in America and Canada, and Secured By Design (SBD) initiatives in the UK. It is argued that various aspects of the theory have avoided consideration and require further investigation and research. It is opined that “defensible space” is the theoretical foundation to both CPTED and SBD and it is posited that a thorough re‐examination of Newman’s ideas will serve to deepen our understanding of the complex relationship between the built environment and crime. British (BS8220) and European (CEN TC/325) Standards relating to urban planning and environmental design and crime reduction are currently receiving detailed deliberation and are based firmly upon Newman’s ideas. The projected need for some 4.4 million new homes in Britain (DOE, 1995) by 2016 and Lord Roger’s call for improvements in urban design to reduce suburban migration from cities (DETR, 1999) reiterates the importance of the subject matter. This paper (the first of two) recognises that design per se does not represent the panacea for reducing criminogeneity, rather, that “defensible space” CPTED and SBD should be considered as crime prevention strategies, which can, in common with all other initiatives, contribute to tackling the problem of residential crime. In conclusion, it is argued that further research concerning how “defensible space” is perceived by various crucial stakeholders in society is the way forward in this regard. A second, forthcoming paper (PM, Vol. 19 No. 3) will present these research findings.

Resilience has recently attracted widespread interest in the field of urban planning and theory. However, the research that has been conducted on urban resilience in Africa has major theoretical and methodological gaps. This can lead to problems when designing and implementing resilience strategies there. Understanding African perspectives can be a way of tackling these. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using the example of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this paper analyses expert interviews based on a grounded theory approach. The goal is to explore locally specific perceptions of and pathways to urban resilience. By comparing these findings to those reported in the existing literature, differences and overlaps are identified.

This study provides evidence for the existence of locally specific perceptions of and pathways to urban resilience. Furthermore, it identifies urban development pathways such as complete urban makeover (tabula rasa) and complete negation of change (resistance).

Because this study uses Addis Ababa as a singular case and expert interviews as method, it rather represents an initial attempt at exploring a new research field than claiming generalisability. Its quality and significance lie in its discursive approach and theory formation.

This exemplary study from Ethiopia demonstrates that a regionally specific understanding of urban resilience is valuable for the design and implementation of urban resilience strategies.

This study offers unique insights into urban resilience from an African perspective and into the manifestation of urban resilience in Addis Ababa.

One of the innumerable ways to systemise contemporary European urban projects is to analyse the urban form originates from the master-plan concept. The duality of closed and open urban situations is an excellent conceptual tool for classification. This classification helps us to recognise, understand and represent the diversity of the city, as it is present on each level of a settlement and architecture.

In the case of “Solid-oriented” projects construction and emplacement of buildings are the main goals. The principle of “Solid-oriented” projects are based on two very different, still existing traditions One is the classical European closed block structure, while the other one is the Modernist open urban system. Today we can identify two new approaches combining those two traditions in different ways. Urban transparency preserves streets, the effect of enclosure, and the dominance of buildings. At the same time density is coupled with spaciousness, blocks are fractured and the environment becomes more complex even within one block. The in-between method, based on the idea of structuralism, attempts to balance the importance of mass and space and creates permeable blocks in a new open urban structure. Besides creating urban volumes or buildings in the city, there is a new type of challenge in contemporary urban design. Since the 1990's attention has shifted to cityscape, i.e. to re-interpreting and reforming open spaces. The international literature calls this un-volumetric architecture. The duality of openness and closedness also appears here. While openness seems to dominate urban situations in contemporary cities, buildings are predominantly used in a closed manner.

Sustainable development requires change in who makes decisions as well as in their content. The field theory of behavioural change is used here to structure a discussion of professionalism in urban design for sustainability. Sustainability and professionalism (both concepts defined by their users) are channelled subjectively, there are barriers in cities, designers act as gatekeepers, learning takes place. There follow sections on cities, designers, learning and research. There is more wealth and more poverty. In addition the cultural diversity of the urban population is becoming ever more evident. Sustainability depends on the interaction between designers and users, on new forms of practice and on new forms of urban development. There needs to be more focus on the improvement of participatory decision-making, and on new forms of communication, in design practice. This argues against a too narrow interpretation of academic standards in schools of architecture and encourages the reevaluation and further development of pragmatic approaches and the transmission of practical skills. Business School methods could be used. A good deal of previous research could usefully be looked at again with the sustainability agenda in mind, including a better understanding of skills. In conclusion, professionals need more multi-disciplinary practice and greater participation in it by lay citizens.

Urban design has historically occupied the gap between architecture and planning. Although there have long been calls for the discipline to bridge this gap, urban design has continued to lean more heavily on design than planning. The efforts to revitalize downtown Toledo, a mid-western U.S. town experiencing steep economic decline, present a classic example of the potentially unfortunate results of this approach. Over the past three decades, there have been many attempts to revitalize the city, especially its downtown, by constructing several large public buildings, all within a few blocks of each other, all designed with little attention to each other or to the surrounding public spaces, and with a remarkable lack of civic engagement.

Responding to calls in the literature for inter-disciplinarity in urban design, and to the city's experience with urban design, the authors created a collaborative studio for architects and planners from two neighboring universities with two purposes: first, to establish a collaborative work environment where any design interventions would be firmly rooted in the planning context (i.e., to erase boundaries between architects and planners); second, to draw lessons from this experience for the practice and teaching of urban design.

Despite the difficulties of collaborating, architects and planners benefited from exposure to each other, learning about each other's work, as well as learning to collaborate. The interdisciplinary teams developed richer proposals than the architect-only teams. Finally, critical engagement with the community is essential to shaping downtown development.