Urban Transformations

Food transformations in African secondary cities

The expansion of Africa’s urban population is taking place largely in secondary cities: these are broadly defined as cities with fewer than half a million people that are not national political or economic hubs. This collection serves as a focal point for new and emerging work on the critical issue, made even more pressing by COVID-19, of how to build sustainable formal and informal food systems in the context of massive transformation at lower levels of the urban hierarchy.

Platform Urbanism

Platforms are the large, near-monopolistic corporations (from Facebook to Google and in between) that are emerging and thriving because they source data, process it, and are able to monetise it. This collection is based on a recognition that platform capitalism has significant urban expressions in platform urbanism. The platforms tend to circulate, ‘land’, and be dependent on cities for their data, their service offerings, and their uptake.

Beyond Urban Living Labs: The making of transformative urban innovation systems

This collection highlights the Urban Living Lab (ULL), which has emerged as a new type of intervention format for leveraging systemic urban change, mostly linked to the pursuit of sustainability goals. There is now an active debate about emerging models of ‘ULL 2.0’--a novel approach aiming towards a ‘transformative urban innovation system’, with a wider group of stakeholders, broader portfolio, deeper layers of value, and further links between cause and effect.

Transformative turn in planning

This collection aims to critically review recent innovations in planning and their relation to the way transformative urban change is prepared, initiated, and sustained. 

Co-producing urban sustainability transitions

This collection explores co-production as a mode of scientific enquiry and how it can contribute to urban sustainability transitions and transformations.

Urban transformations are of vital importance for the future of humanity and ecosystem Earth. New knowledge on the subject, dynamics and directions of urban change is dearly needed to shift current development trajectories in the global North and South towards sustainability.

We invite contributions from any disciplines addressing these issues. The journal seeks to deepen and broaden current understandings theoretically, empirically and methodologically. There is a need for novel perspectives, drawing on ontological and epistemological multiplicity, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches. We welcome comparative research designs, as well as innovative methods and techniques. Priority will be given to outcomes from science-practice co-production and co-design.

Read more

Do you have an idea for a novel topic that should be discussed in Urban Transformations? Be a Guest Editor and advance the field through an article collection. We invite proposals with a strong editorial concept that offer new insights and perspectives.

You can find further information about the requirements and submit your idea on our article collection proposals page.