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The COVID-19 pandemic has made many urban policymakers, planners, and scholars, all around the globe, rethink conventional, neoliberal growth strategies of cities. The trend of rapid urbanization, particularly around capital cities, has been questioned, and alternative growth models and locations have been the subjects of countless discussions. This is particularly the case for the Australian context: The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the debates in urban circles on post-pandemic urban growth strategies and boosting the growth of towns and cities across regional Australia is a popular alternative strategy. While some scholars argue that regional Australia poses an invaluable opportunity for post-pandemic growth by ‘taking off the pressure from the capital cities’; others warn us about the risks of growing regional towns and cities without carefully designed national, regional, and local planning, design, and development strategies. Superimposing planning and development policies meant for metropolitan cities could simply result in transferring the ills of capital cities to regions and exacerbate unsustainable development and heightened socioeconomic inequalities. This opinion piece, by keeping both of these perspectives in mind, explores approaches to regional community and economic development of Australia’s towns and cities, along with identifying sustainable urban growth locations in the post-pandemic era. It also offers new insights that could help re-shape the policy debate on regional growth and development.

Abstract Metropolitan cities and regions are vastly exposed to the global climate change impacts. The reasons for such exposure include the gradual urban encroachments to nearby peri‑urban areas that cause destruction of natural resources and ecosystem services. While policymakers and planners are struggling to make trade-offs between urban growth, environmental degradation and mitigating climate change impacts, limited evidence exists regarding the public perceptions on the matter. This study aims to address the question of how does the public perceive on the interplay between peri‑urban growth and climate change? The methodology concerns conducting an online survey with the peri‑urban dwellers (n = 659) from South East Queensland, Australia, and undertaking an exploratory factor analysis on the collected data. The study findings reveal that: (a) Younger and highly educated people are much stronger believers of climate change; (b) People composting at home have a stronger belief in human-induced climate change than those using solar energy, energy monitoring devices and harvesting rainwater; (c) Despite local impacts of climate change garb the attention of almost everyone, self-motivations towards shifting habits and taking actions for mitigating climate change are limited, and; (d) Government policies and actions for combatting climate crises are largely seen inadequate.

Abstract Renewable energy and energy efficiency are recognized among the key factors of transitioning towards a low-consumption and low-carbon society. In order to achieve such transition, the government policies should be aimed at meeting the renewable energy generation and energy efficiency targets of specific localities. Nonetheless, these targets vary between different urban regions, and there is limited knowledge on the correlation between energy transition and urbanization levels. The aim of this paper is to identify that correlation in urban regions. This study places Italian regions under the microscope of an empirical investigation. The study adopts a two-step analysis that provides a useful model for regional analyses. The results of the study consolidates our understanding and highlights that the energy transition process requires greater efforts concerning social participation and provision of incentives for renewable energy production, mainly in the less urbanized areas.

During the last several decades, the diversification of economic activities has become a paramount policy for nations and cities with heavy dependence on a single economic driver. Particularly island economies, relying mainly on tourism income, are among the most vulnerable ones to the shocks of global financial crises. In the recent years, some of these tourist islands had attempts to diversify their economic activities by moving towards a knowledge and innovation economy. This paper places one of these islands—Florianópolis, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina—under the microscope to address the question of ‘what it takes to transform a tourist island into an innovation capital’. In order to tackle this question, the study examines economic, social, spatial, and governance conditions and performances, along with the plans and processes of Florianópolis in moving towards an internationally recognized smart innovation island. The methodologic approach includes systematic review of the literature and qualitative analysis of the key development domains of Florianópolis through the lens of knowledge-based urban development. The results of this study provide insights into how to transform a resource-based economy into a knowledge-based one—by disclosing the transition journey of Florianópolis, including progress, challenges, and the new path creation processes. The findings are particularly useful for tourist islands that are aiming for an aspiring knowledge-based urban development and smart city transformation.

During the last couple of decades, making cities smarter and more sustainable has become an important urban agenda. In this perspective, knowledge-based development is seen as a strategic approach for cities seeking to thrive through innovation and resilience. Accomplishing a knowledge-based development agenda is, however, challenging, and cities need support mechanisms to effectively develop and then incorporate such agendas into their decision-making processes. This study investigates the role of international events as one of these support mechanisms for the development and implementation of local knowledge-based development agendas. The study aims to address how international events contribute to the local knowledge-based development efforts. This study takes the Knowledge Cities World Summit (KCWS) series as the exemplar international event, and the Brazilian city of Bento Gonçalves as the case study city. The methodological approach of the study consists of semi-structured interview-based qualitative analysis and case study investigations. The findings of the study revealed the following: (a) international events can be fundamental drivers of local knowledge-based agendas; (b) these events contribute to host cities’ development, especially at an institutional level, by generating outcomes such as engagement in cooperation networks and leveraging local actors’ influence on the development process; and (c) KCWS was instrumental in placing the local university as a protagonist of the knowledge-based development movement of Bento Gonçalves. The study reported in this paper provides invaluable insights for cities seeking to use international knowledge-based development events for smart and sustainable city formation.

Solid biomass planning is a complex and multifaceted process, as it aims to achieve a large number of objectives while involving various stakeholders. This complexity heightens particularly in marginal areas, where socioeconomic weaknesses are critical obstacles to the sustainable development of these territories. This paper proposes an integrated method for dealing with such problem by using a combined optimization approach. This is done in order to implement the ‘best’ investment solution to be realized in marginal areas, and a benefit cost analysis to assess the feasibility of investment for each involved operator. The methodology of the study maximizes the utility of the stakeholders in the respect of the territory. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been demonstrated through a twofold and comparative application, both in Italy and in Germany, in order to verify the results.

Technological advancements such as information and communication technologies (ICTs), artificial intelligence (AI), internet-of-things (IoT), and the increasing popularity of the smart city and smart living movements during the last couple of decades boosted the developments in the smart home domain. Although the number of smart home related research has been expanding rapidly, there is still a lack of systematic analysis of the evolution of this research domain. This study helps to generate an understanding of the historical vicissitude, state-of-the-art and emerging trends, and the existing smart home research clusters. The study applies a scientometric method to analyse the published scholarly research (n=17,153) over the last two decades, from 2000 to 2021. The scientometric analysis findings reveal that: Smart home literature has experienced steady growth during the last two decades; Smart home research has mainly clustered around ICT for home automation, home information management, AI for home automation, domestic energy management, IoT for home automation, and home-based healthcare areas; IoT is seen as the most popular technology to realise fully functioning smart homes; Limited evidence exists on the urban perspective and social issues of smart home technology; Smart homes are seen potentially as a strong driver of the smart city agenda.

In many parts of the world, a rapid urbanization process is taking place at an unprecedented scale, and its drastic impacts on societies and the environment are evident. To combat the externalities of such rapid, and to a degree uncontrolled, development, many cities around the globe introduced various urban growth management policies. However, policy making—to provide sustainable outcomes, while generating growth opportunities—has been a daunting task for urban administrators. To ease the task, scenario-based planning methods are introduced to produce alternative visions for managing urban growth in sustainable ways by incorporating various socio-environmental issues. However, even though modelling urban growth and associated impacts based on these scenarios have emerged to strengthen and quantify the future of urban policies and related planning actions, this process has a number of glitches. Major issues include the uncertainties associated with the selection of suitable methods to generate scenarios, identify indicators to be used to assess scenarios, evaluate scenarios to prioritize for policy formulation, and assess the impacts of policy scenarios. This paper aims to address the challenge of developing suitable policy scenarios for sustainable urban growth. As for the methodological approach, the study undertakes a thorough review of the literature and current practices, and conducts a two-round Delphi survey—involving experts from public, private and academic sectors specialized in the fields of urban planning, environmental planning, social planning, transportation modelling, and economic development. The expert driven policy scenarios are validated in a local context by comparing findings against the policy options as proposed in the South East Queensland Regional Plan 2017 (Australia). The findings offer valuable guidelines for planners, modellers, and policy makers in adopting suitable methods, indicators, and policy priorities, and thus, easing the daunting task of generating sustainable policy solutions.