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Urban planning in the Global South is insufficiently discussed in research. In addition to the global lack of utilization of research in practice, this lack of discussion resulted in an apparent gap between research, practice, governmental policies and education particularly in the Global South. The paper explores the inconsistency of interest between policymakers, practitioners and researchers by reviewing their themes of interest comparatively. The paper investigates the case study of Egypt, which recently faces a new regime with optimistic urban agendas and examines the research publication that coincided with it.

A scientometric analysis is conducted on all urban planning publications in Egypt between 2016 and 2022 using the software ‘CiteSpace’. The analysis illustrates the dominating research interests using the publications keyword.

The analysis revealed a distinct interest between researchers, who were more invested in themes like ‘planning policies’, ‘informal settings’, ‘urban expansion and growth’ and ‘urban governance and management’, while policymakers were more devoted to themes related ‘satellite cities or new cities’, ‘public transit and transit networks’, ‘informal settings’ and ‘urban expansion and growth’. The themes of interest are displayed in network analysis for a comparative analysis with other aspects like practices, governmental policies and education.

The research utilizes all research publications in the field (in a selected period) to develop a study of the research interest in the field of urban planning in Egypt during the recent years. In addition, it uses novel scientometric software to assist in analysing existing publications to produce new findings and trends.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a more socially centred understanding of living labs for urban research questions by reflecting on current technologically centred and innovation-driven approaches.

The paper takes the form of literature review complemented by conceptual knowledge from practical experiences.

Urban living labs, as they were introduced from a technological and economic point of view, have to be translated into the context of social sciences. By doing so, they may be a promising tool to stimulate co-creation and collaboration also in urban research projects that focus on social research questions and include diverse target groups. Socially centred living labs take into account the local context by developing a space of encounter for the participants in the urban living lab and by implementing a set of living methods that suit both the research design and the local requirements.

This paper argues that urban living labs can be a valuable tool in urban research to include researchers, politicians, local stakeholders and residents in an open concept of co-creation. It argues that a locally contextualised design in terms of space and methods is necessary to create an environment of trust and collaboration.

Freight network planning and the application of distribution innovations are popular fields of research on sustainable urban logistics. However, considerable research on freight network design lacks a comprehensive consideration of the application of distribution innovations. This observation implies that sustainable urban freight research appears highly fragmented in topics of network design and distribution innovations. From the perspective of long-term planning, this situation possibly serves as a barrier to further promotion of sustainability. The objective of this paper is to analyze existing research gaps of literature to further promote the sustainability of urban logistics systems from a future perspective.

This paper employs a systematic literature review (SLR) method, which covers 164 papers and research works published in 2013–2018. The article corpus involved the innovative schemes of freight network design and the emerging delivery concepts in cities. Based on an analysis of articles' relevance, the most significant research contributions on both city logistics network design and exploitation of distribution innovations are detected.

This paper has found four research gaps in aspects of network design and distribution innovations. To respond to these gaps, we propose the research framework of sustainable and flexible future urban freight planning (SFFUFP) based on trends of city development, while discussing further research direction on urban freight planning.

The authors have found four research gaps in aspects of both urban freight network design and distribution innovations in which scholars could be encouraged to contribute. The research framework of SFFUFP can further promote sustainable urban logistics from a view of future management.

The academic library mission is defined based on the need to support the larger parent university mission. In the case of the urban university, which has been the focus of relatively little discussion and research in the library and information science literature, the research component of the mission potentially influences research agendas as well as the decisions of faculty who choose to teach and do research in such a setting, with a particular focus on “applied scholarship” or research that is community‐focused, considering social problems. Of the urban issues that have shaped the urban university mission, crime is also a key determinant of the resilience of urban areas. The breadth and depth of the research issues related to crime have been well‐documented. The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the research findings, indicating the complexity of the research and findings, as well.

The research related to crime ranges from the basic documentation of crime statistics, to the analysis of trends in the data, to attempts to understand why factors as divergent as economic downturns, media coverage, drug use, population reductions, weather or season of the year, and sentencing guidelines impact crime rates. The research also addresses issues, such as the use of DNA and other forensic evidence in crime investigation and juror opinions and the fallibility of eyewitness accounts. The paper presents an overview and analysis of crime‐related research, reflecting the breadth of such research and examples, which indicate the fact that the research is frequently characterized by complexity, often manifested in findings that are inconclusive and conflicting, and rarely reflecting causality. The paper presents an analysis of the research related to crime, intended to be representative, not exhaustive, of a broad range of examples of findings and analyses, across a range of academic disciplines and professions, supported by academic libraries.

The analysis of research related to the causes of increases and reductions in crime, why crime rates vary by city, and a range of other related issues reflects broad interest in enhanced understanding of issues related to crime, among researchers across disciplines, public policymakers and law enforcement, as well as members of the general public. This interest is reflected, not only in the amount of published research, the publication of such research in disciplinary, scholarly sources, but also in the general interest literature, and the growth in research following increases in various types of crimes. The analysis also reflects interest in a number of specific research questions and the extent to which models, such as the broken windows theory, possibly the best known theory of this type, are effective in reducing violent crime. The results of research related to crime indicate the complexity, breadth and interdisciplinarity of the concepts studied by scientists and social scientists, as well as the complexity of research findings, as represented in inconclusive and conflicting findings and difficulty in isolating variables and representing causality.

The analysis of the nature, breadth, complexity, and interdisciplinarity of the research related to crime provides the basis for a more informed approach in considering the role of the urban university library, in particular, in supporting fulfillment of the larger institutional mission.

The purpose of this paper is to review, analyze and synthesize different pieces from literature to explore, define and describe the concept of social capital and its relationships with urban neighborhood design concepts. Additionally, to define the indicators and principles that can enhance social capital within urban design context. Moreover, to suggest theoretical urban neighborhood design concept that can adopt the changing discourse of social capital.

This research used the theoretical, analytical and descriptive approach-driven case study method. In all, 29 papers were analyzed to conclude the indicators that can measure social capital within the urban neighborhood design context and to conclude the required neighborhood design features and principles that influence social capital. Additionally, two new urban neighborhoods design concepts, cohousing and hybrid concepts that adopt new forms of social interaction, were studied, analyzed and then synthesized to suggest new neighborhood design concept, which is a heterotopia concept.

Heterotopia neighborhood concept aims to create real, different and heterogeneous functional spaces with different layers of meanings for people from different cultures in one place. Different visible enclosures are merged into spaces of otherness while the diversity gives a sense of entering another alternative place. The heterotopias neighborhood design principles aim to create a wide variety of forms, shapes and elements [different new spaces for different ritual activities to reflect the otherness self-reflection (homogeneous and scattered spaces)] and create linkage, hierarchy, contrast and mingling between spaces and places; well-defined functional effective spaces; different fantasy and leisure spaces; high standard quality of life and otherness space; flux in social realm and fluidity of spaces; mixed use and joint experience; and innovated technologies spaces to offer strange new temporalities.

This research recommended that different community stakeholders should participate in planning process, neighborhood urban design and decision-making process about public spaces to strengthen the community ties and achieve a heterotopia concept. Architect, urban designers and planners should adopt bottom-up design approach when designing neighborhood. Additionally, to avoid poor social capital research studies, the new researchers, practitioners and journal reviewers approaching social capital for the first time must read widely to gain an understanding of the concept from different perspectives and narrow their scope to their particular area of interest.

This research highlights the needs for empirical studies to examine the relationships/interrelationships between all neighborhood design principles and social capital. This might increase the knowledge on how we can design and increase the quality of neighborhood to foster social capital, which might offer interesting insights into how neighborhood urban design principles are combined to foster social capital within neighborhood context.

Neighborhood-based research encourages new suggesting concepts in designing every single place in the residential neighborhood in a way that can adapt the new forms of social interaction. This research scanned the current concepts of neighborhood design that concerned successfully with the changing forms of social relationships to conclude some design features and principles for neighborhood design to ensure and promote social public health and well-being. This research offers a unique perspective for better understanding the relationships between the neighborhood urban design as a spatial dimension and social capital. This research aims to enrich the socio-spatial knowledge and build a resilient urban community by suggesting theoretical urban neighborhood design concept, which is the heterotopia concept, and providing the urban designers and architects with a valuable thinking tool to design spaces.

The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in urban logistics originating from both the research and the practitioners’ communities. Sustainable freight transports today are on the political, social and technological agenda of many actors operating in urban contexts. Due to the extent of the covered areas and the continuous progress in many fields, the resulting body of research on urban logistics appears quite fragmented. From an engineering management perspective, the purpose of this paper is to present a systematic literature review (SLR) that aims to consolidate the knowledge on urban logistics, analyse the development of the discipline, and provide future research directions.

The paper discusses the main evidence emerging from a SLR on urban logistics. The corpus resulting from the SLR has been used to perform a citation network analysis and a main path analysis that together underpin the identification of the most investigated topics and methodologies in the field.

Through the analysis of a corpus of 104 articles, the most important research contributions on urban logistics that represent the structural backbone in the development of the research over time in the field are detected. Based on these findings, this work identifies and discusses three areas of potential interest for future research.

This paper presents an SLR related to a research area in which the literature is extremely fragmented. The results provide insights about the research path, current trends and future research directions in the field of urban logistics.

The research article's primary purpose is to understand the advancements in urban logistics and allied fields over time along with a consideration of its enabling technologies.

An initial review is used to build a keyword vocabulary, combinations of which were then applied to the Scopus, ScienceDirect, Emerald Insights, the Web of Science (WOS), Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, Wiley, Inderscience, Springer, Google Scholar and IEEE Xplore for extracting academic publication collection. The first part includes bibliometric analysis; network analysis is done based on the finally selected 645 papers (only those articles include either of the keywords mentioned above in title, abstract, and keywords). The second part conducts a review of the existing literature review studies (only 21 literature review studies out of 645 articles). The last one discusses the advancement in the topics based on the selected research articles.

This research discussed the advancement of the urban logistics and allied field, key academic forums and key researchers. It is evident from the analysis that the research related to key emerging themes like implementing innovative concepts and sustainability; application of green technologies; data collection, visualization, monitoring and sharing; and automatic logistic systems are still in the nascent stage. However, these research areas gained momentum in the recent past.

Urban logistics are essential and play a crucial role for such rapidly growing cities to function. Despite playing a vital role, urban ecosystem logistics is often neglected in formal urban planning. Hence, as a response to customer and business demand, private entities regularly invest in new technologies and solutions. Since such investments are toward profits, various environmental, social and economic challenges arise.

This research investigates the advancements in urban logistics toward smart, sustainable reforms in developing enabling technologies and markets. The obtained research articles are subjected to bibliometric, descriptive, network and content analysis to present a rundown of advancements, relationships and trends in emerging research gaps.

The purpose of this study is to identify research perspectives/clusters in the field of urban tourism (city tourism) in narrow sense and tourism cities (cities and tourism) in the broader sense to examine the complex relationship through the optics of science mapping. This paper believes that the existing qualitative assessments of this field can be experimentally verified and visualized.

First, the key conceptual dilemmas of research perspectives in urban tourism are highlighted. Based on the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection and the VOSviewer (computer program for visualizing bibliometric networks), the data will be analyzed. Clustering is used to evaluate information retrieval (inclusivity or selectivity of the search query), publication patterns (journal articles), author keywords, terminology and to identify the respective cities and author collaborations between countries.

Terminological specificities and their contextuality (authors’ preferences) are elaborated, as the topic is studied by authors from different disciplinary fields. Compared to other specific tourisms, urban tourism includes geographic terms (variations of city names) and terms with different connotations (travelers, visitors). Recent Spanish (also Portuguese) linguistic/geographic contexts are noticeable and a strong presence of WOS Emerging Sources Citation Index papers. Research perspectives are represented in the network of clusters of connected terms. If the search is based on a narrower sense of strict urban tourism, then tourism-business topics predominate. If tourism and cities are less closely linked, socio-cultural and environmental-spatial perspectives emerge, as does tourism/cities vulnerability (climate change and health issues).

The construction of a search syntax for the purpose of retrieval is always marked by compromises, given different terminological usages. A narrow search query will miss many relevant documents. On the other hand, if the query is too general, it returns less relevant documents. To this end, this paper tested queries on three different levels of inclusivity or selectivity. More consistent use of terms would benefit authors in the field of urban tourism when searching for references (information retrieval) and, as a consequence, would allow better integration of the field.

This study provides a practical method for evaluating cities and tourism in combining the expertise of an information scientist and a sociologist. It points out numerous caveats in information retrieval. It offers an overview of publishing just prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, thus providing an opportunity for further comparative studies.

This study is the first to examine urban tourism using such a method and can serve as a complement to the existing systematization of qualitative approaches. The findings are consistent with numerous qualitative assessments of weak the research interconnection between the specifics of cities and tourism in terms of broader socio-spatial processes. However, the study suggests that such research linkage is increasing, which is noticeable in relation to issues of social sustainability (e.g. overtourism, Airbnb and touristification).

The purpose of the research is to propose reforms that would help to bridge the gap between theory and practice and produce more effective urban planners. The research on urban planning curricula in the global South is a valuable contribution to the field of urban planning education. It provides a new perspective on the challenges facing urban planning education in these countries and offers a roadmap for improvement.

The research explores and evaluates the urban planning curricula in the global South, with a particular interest in Egypt. The research employs the use of questionnaires with 56 university instructors, analysed thematically, to evaluate the current content of curricula. The results are compared and correlated with a pilot study exploring research interest, government policies and practices of urban planning in Egypt.

Through comparing the results of the evaluation with the current research interest in urban planning in Egypt, the paper investigates the possibility of improving current educational curricula using comparative network analysis which would establish stronger interdisciplinary connections.

The seeming disconnects between urbanism concepts taught in educational curricula and their relevance in practice and reality is a vital issue in urban studies and planning. Interdisciplinary connections with topics like politics, economies, gender, and others can assist curricula in becoming more relevant to real-world situations. This disconnect is even more apparent in the global South where most educational content is highly derivative from Northern contexts. Though such interdisciplinary aspects are under discussed in educational curricula, they are frequently discussed in academic research.