Visual experience is a primary channel through which the values of tangible cultural heritage are perceived and governed, making visual evaluation and management central to conservation and to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11.4. However, practice remains fragmented across scales, and many statutory toolkits lag behind advances in geographic information systems (GIS)-based visibility analysis, 3D visualization, remote sensing, and perception-based evidence. We compile, code, and cross-analyze a multi-level corpus spanning 26 international instruments, 293 national items from 112 countries, and 867 World Heritage properties. Using a four-dimensional framework (values, typology, visual-evaluation methods, and visual-management strategies), we apply k-medoids clustering with multidimensional scaling (MDS) at the national level, mask-aware association mapping at the property level, and cross-level diagnostics. Across levels, practice converges on a technical-spatial regime. At the property level, GIS-based viewshed and visual sensitivity analysis, verified visuals and 3D visualization techniques, and GIS-based spatial-historical analysis form a near-universal methodological core and are most frequently translated into zoning and spatial regulation and height or massing controls. Participatory and perception- or experience-based methods remain sporadic. Value framings are dominated by Historic, Social and Political, and Aesthetic emphases, while Ecological and Scientific are comparatively marginal. Cross-level coherence is strongest where governance frameworks are mature, and portfolios are coherent; it weakens where portfolios are heterogeneous or in federated or lower-capacity settings. National portfolios cluster into four method-strategy regimes that explain characteristic object-method-strategy sequences. In response, we outline operational bridges including tiered standards for visibility and 3D evidence, deployable perception protocols, participation modules linked to Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA) or Visual Impact Assessment (VIA) triggers, and auditable communication packages. These are organized within a Global Peer Network aligned to portfolio archetypes and method-strategy regimes. The study contributes a reusable global dataset and map of visual-heritage practice and an integration framework that supports more transparent, comparable, and context-sensitive decisions across levels. ... Read more

Cultural landscapes are increasingly vulnerable to the compounded effects of potential risks, ecological degradation, and imbalanced heritage value perceptions under intensifying climate change and global urbanization pressures. However, there is a lack of framework that systematically integrates geographical hazards, ecological sensitivity, and both expert and public heritage value perceptions to guide differentiated conservation and development of cultural landscapes. This study proposes a Hazard-Ecology-Perception Landscape Planning (HEPLP) framework to provide a spatially explicit decision-support tool that unifies hazard, ecology, and perception dimensions for cultural landscape planning. HEPLP is evaluated in a case study of Chengde Mountain Resort. A GIS-based methodology is employed to characterize geographical hazards and ecological sensitivity by combining concept of entropy and Analytic Hierarchy Process. Expert scoring and large language model content analysis are used to map heritage value perceptions. Risk-based analysis and three-dimensional clustering revealed nine distinct clusters in cultural landscape, providing spatially grounded evidence for targeted conservation and development strategies. This includes many scenes where previously implemented landscape planning strategies have been designated for complete conservation, as well as clusters where trade-offs between ecological sensitivity and heritage value perception are carefully balanced. Unlike previous frameworks that focused on single or dual dimensions, HEPLP offers an integrative tool for sustainable cultural landscape conservation and development under environmental and social challenges. ... Read more

As cultural landscapes increasingly evolve within urban environments, a persistent gap has emerged between their heritage spatial characteristics and public heritage value perception, undermining urban identity and sustainability. This study introduces the Perceptual–Spatial Landscape Planning Model, an integrative framework that positions route optimization as a strategic planning intervention to bridge this gap. Taking Chengde Mountain Resort as a case, we constructed a spatial network of 144 scenes and collected 43,879 user-generated social media comments to quantify public perception. We achieved perceptual–spatial coupling through: 1) a few-shot learning paradigm based on a large language model generates five distinct perception scores of each scene; 2) the resulting scores are then integrated with heritage spatial characteristics in graph neural networks using graph attention networks and deep graph infomax. Based on the coupling process, the optimized routes were generated by a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. The optimized routes outperformed official and greedy baselines, achieving higher spatial diversity, perceptual coherence, lower variance, and broader coverage of marginal yet meaningful scenes. These routes avoided overconcentration in perceptual hotspots as conventional tourism planning while enhancing interpretive richness across various spaces. This model provides strong contextual transferability, offering interpretable framework for integrating public perception into cultural landscape planning, thereby advancing both the methodological rigor and spatial intelligence of cultural landscapes’ development in urban environments. ... Read more

Today’s urbanization pressures present complex challenges in sustainable and socio-ecological transitions. Historical planning tools and theories, such as the Open Society concept, offer alternative approaches to regeneration and inclusivity. Critical mapping is a growing method in urban regeneration. However, we observed that this tool has not been sufficiently explored in a comparative fashion. In this paper, we examine the Open Society concept by comparing and contrasting ’t Hool, Eindhoven and Montbau, Barcelona to assess the concept’s continuing relevance for the regeneration of Modernist housing in the twenty-first century. We construct a comparative critical cartography using mixed-methods (mostly qualitative) to highlight interspatial relations on both neighborhoods. This method is a tool that aids us to highlight power-knowledge relations and detect spatial patterns from different fields, to extract site-specific lessons that inform urban regeneration. This research bridges the gap between theory, design and practice providing tools and comparative approaches to promote more transdisciplinary and more holistic approach to space and place. Addressing the complexity of space with a creative and systematic approach should address the relativism of site-specific knowledge and turn it into more generalizable lessons for urban regeneration. ... Read more

Sometime in the next year or two, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jóvenes. The exact event is unimportant, and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions. For the first time, the urban population of the world will outnumber the rural. ... Read more

Traditional Chinese gardens embody sophisticated spatial design principles often described through abstract terms like “scenic archetypes,” yet systematic methods for analyzing their visual spatial characteristics remain underdeveloped. This study establishes an analytical framework integrating phenomenological theory with AI-enabled multimodal mapping to quantify spatial visual characteristics of four scenic archetypes, including framed, obstructive, porous, and sandwiched scenery, at Hangzhou West Lake. By decomposing scenic compositions and configurations into foreground-middle-background hierarchies characterized through shape, size, position, and texture variables, the framework achieves 94.12% classification accuracy via random forest modeling while revealing each archetype. Statistical analysis identifies archetype-specific spatial strategies: framed scenery employs regular foreground geometry with smooth depth transitions; obstructive scenery utilizes systematic positioning with texture contrasts; porous scenery balances visual permeability with textural variation; sandwiched scenery creates bilateral symmetry with channeling effects. This approach provides replicable methodology for heritage conservation and contemporary landscape design informed by traditional spatial wisdom. ... Read more

Examines treaty ports as mechanisms of extraterritorial jurisdiction and economic control, relevant for legal practitioners and policymakers analyzing contemporary international trade agreements and sovereignty disputes. ... Read more

The concept of historic gardens has gradually expanded to encompass a broader range of landscape meanings. UNESCO's cultural landscape categories have significantly influenced land policy improvements in the context of globalization, with historic gardens being classified as Category 1 cultural landscapes. The other categories are organically evolved landscapes (Category 2) and associative cultural landscapes (Category 3). While existing studies have primarily focused on each of these categories individually, it remains unclear how to characterize a cultural landscape when all three categories coexist and influence each other, as seen in complex cases such as the Chengde Mountain Resort (CMR). Furthermore, strategies for improving sustainable land management based on this understanding are still lacking. This study uses landscape mapping to collect data, digitally reconstruct, and characterize cultural landscapes in the CMR based on four environmental factors: topography, accessibility, visibility, and land use changes. Based on this, we illustrate the evolution of the CMR through reconstruction, capturing four phases detailed in 144 scenes. From this, we identify six distinct groups of scenes with six targeted indicators, each reflecting specific spatial attributes of Category 1. Additionally, statistical and comparative analyses of land use changes illuminate various landscape dynamics of these scenes that correspond to Categories 2 and 3. The discussion presents a systematic sustainable pathway to characterize the interdependencies among UNESCO’s three cultural landscape categories. Based on these findings, this research proposes a three-level management model that connects dynamic authenticity and modern functionality, offering insights for urban policymakers navigating pluralistic cultural landscapes. ... Read more

The Netherlands is one of the best places to live if you’re a member of the LGBTQIA+ community: same-sex activity has been legal since in 1811; it was the first country in the world to allow same-sex marriage in 2001; and couples can adopt children. There is, in effect, no difference between being ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ except in how people choose to constitute their families and living arrangements.

This article traces the journeys taken by two gay foreigners living in the Netherlands: Gregory Bracken, an Assistant Professor in Urbanism originally from Ireland, and TJ Rivera, a graduation-year masters’ student in Architecture originally from the Philippines. These are our personal stories, both different yet with oddly similar trajectories. This is perhaps because we’re both from devoutly Catholic countries where we were seen as ‘bad queers’ – using Carl Stychin’s memorable terminology (1998). In the Netherlands, however, we’re ‘good gays’ and these are our personal reflections on how this came to be. Our stories will hopefully help you understand the journeys we’ve taken to becoming accepted as citizens here, despite our difference from the majority in a heteronormative society. And while our stories are positive and our own personal and professional outlooks optimistic, we end this piece with a warning about the internal struggles in the LGBTQIA+ community because of new homonormativity’s dividing practice which are in danger of fragmenting it along dangerous new lines of race, class, and gender. ... Read more

Books on Shanghai’s history tend to fall broadly into two categories: nostalgia for the “colonial” era and descriptions (often grim) of the Communist period that followed. Shanghai was not, in fact, a colony; it was a Treaty Port, one of five opened by the British after the end of the First Opium War in 1842 (the others being Canton [Guangzhou], Amoy [Xiamen], Foochow [Fuzhou], and Ningpo [Ningbo]). These ports increased in size, wealth, and number until 1943 when the system was ended with the Treaty for the Relinquishment of ExtraTerritorial Rights in China. [...] ... Read more

Jakarta, capital of Indonesia (for now) was founded by the Dutch and is a venue for social and spatial experimentation, not to mention the corruption and mismanagement of post-independence ‘elite informality’ (p. 113), and the city is literally sinking under its own weight. Abidin Kusno’s wide-ranging yet in-depth study of the city and its multidimensional challenges contains a felicitous mix of theoretical investigations grounded in real-life examples to unfold the story of the ‘city of a thousand dimensions’ (a term borrowed from Seno Gumira Ajidarma). In it he argues that a lack of planning has actually allowed a degree of flexibility in accommodating formal and informal, which he sees as an ‘art of governing’ (p. xi). Using multiple sites and issues, Kusno shows a ‘socio-political dimension that is neither formal nor disorderly’ (p. xii). The routines of everyday life should not be neglected, he says, because ‘they are often governed by a spatial configuration that is inescapably political’ (p. xii). ... Read more

French philosopher Michel Foucault first mentioned heterotopia in a lecture to architects in 1967. Up to this time it had been a medical term (one also used in biology and zoology). It denoted the presence of unusual tissue that can co-exist with normal tissue in a body; the heterotopic tissue shouldn’t be there but it does no harm. Foucault applied this term to ‘those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others’ (Foucault, 1991). Places that contain layers of meaning or relationships that aren’t immediately obvious. ... Read more

Although there have been numerous studies on the heritage attributes, characteristics, and values of the historic garden as a special category of cultural heritage, the question is why a comprehensive review combining mainstream historic garden conservation with ways of understanding the garden in a landscape context has not been conducted. Landscape is an integrative concept that combines physical features and the diversity of functions with social and ecological processes throughout the scales of time and space. Therefore, this landscape context means applying the landscape approach to explore the organic connection between the scale of evolution and the architectonic elements in relation to each other. To elaborate, instead of viewing the garden as an object in one specific temporal-spatial frame, such an approach focuses on the evolution of the site in order to identify persistent structures and other values. The method used in this study involved paper coding as qualitative analysis combined with bibliometric visualization software. We reviewed 162 studies to explore the interconnections between the historic garden and landscape approach. The result is that there are three correspondences between landscape approaches and different stages of the historic garden’s conservation and development: studies identifying the historic garden’s characteristics using landscape mapping, studies demonstrating historic gardens’ conservation based on landscape planning, and studies exploring the potential of development and reuse through landscape design. Finally, we discuss the research gaps and outline an action framework for the conservation and development of heritage gardens in a landscape context. ... Read more

In the heart of the Pearl River Delta, the city of Guangzhou is fast-growing and prone to flooding. In history, people constructed canals based on natural waterways to deal with water problems. The canal system not only served as an important infrastructure but was also as the backbone of urban life. But with the development of the road network in recent decades, the urban canals in the historical inner city have been neglected and are disappearing, losing their identity, and becoming the forgotten side of the city. What can be learned from the historical situation to reactivate the urban canals as carriers of socially and ecologically inclusive urban space? This chapter aims to identify design principles for (historical) urban canal design and examine their potential through design exploration, with Donghao Chong as a typical example. The results showcase how, through the meaningful application of historical knowledge, urban canals can become a water landscape infrastructure that effectively integrates public space by combining design, heritage, water management, and ecology. ... Read more

Practices of spatial (and social) justice depend on our rights as citizens, and those rights are under threat in an increasingly polarised and authoritarian world. Authoritarianism may be easy to spot in a non-Western, non-democratic context but it exists, too, in the West in the form of Surveillance Capitalism, where wealthy, powerful corporations operating with little regulatory oversight are making decisions that affect our lives, work, and well-being.

This paper will discuss contemporary conceptualisations of spatial justice, beginning with an exploration of the damage being done to procedural justice when our rights are eroded by ‘black-box’ algorithms which replace human relationships so that certainty can replace trust. The paper will specifically address points 4 and 6: ‘evaluation of policy interventions and their impact on spatial justice’ and ‘challenges and opportunities in implementing spatial justice benchmarks’ in order to relate them to distributive justice to show how fair and equitable distribution of the burdens and benefits of human association are being tilted in favour of social media companies through the unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and power that accrues through their knowledge of us. As Shoshana Zuboff says in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019), ‘surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us’ (italics in original). By examing social media’s business model we can see how it sacrifices truth to profit, leading to the ‘post-truth’ world we now inhabit, where ‘alternative facts’ or ‘lived experience’ make truth in public discourse seem, not just relative, but up for grabs; where strength of conviction seems to count more than any objective assessment of reality.

Using Michel Foucault’s theories of power relations to explain the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism, I show how we, as consumers, eagerly insert ourselves into the apparatuses of social media and, as a result, render up our information for others’ use and profit. This latest incarnation of Foucault’s concept of ‘bio-power’ revives Karl Marx’s nineteenth-century image of capitalism as a vampire feeding on labour, only in the twenty-first century, ‘instead of labour, it is feeding on every aspect of every human’s experience’ (Zuboff 2019).

The paper ends, however, with a note of hope because it argues that we will always be able to have agency as citizens, provided we use that agency and not allow ourselves fritter it away simply because we want to be entertained. We need to practice our citizenship; it is an active thing. The theoretical explorations in this paper will help inform us about the spatial and social practices of justice. By helping us understand what is going on, and the dangers we currently face (as well as highlighting the effects these dangers are already having on our lives) we will be better able to prepare ourselves to deal with them in the future. ... Read more

'Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary', edited by H. Hazel Hahn, examines a phenomenon she says is as old as the history of human settlement. One of the book’s main strengths is its focus on exchange for the modern period which, as Hahn admits, is unusual but useful because it’s not so well understood (particularly when compared to the early-modern era). ... Read more

Macau was founded by the Portuguese in 1557 and was the West’s gateway to China before becoming a colonial backwater in the nineteenth century. It became a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China in 1999, something that, according to Tim Simpson, augured ‘the embryonic stirring of a world-historical geopolitical realignment [with] the gradual geographical translocation of the axis of global capitalism from the once-dominant West to East Asia’ (pp. 4–5). ... Read more

How knowledge is transmitted within and across cultures is the broad theme linking the three books under discussion here: 'Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary', edited by H. Hazel Hahn, 'Building Colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City' by Cecilia L. Chu, and Peter G. Rowe and Yun Fu’s 'Southeast Asian Modern: From Roots to Contemporary Turns'. In them, we see how networks facilitate knowledge exchange and the effects this can have on society and, in particular, the built environment of East and Southeast Asia. The first two books deal with the colonial era. H. Hazel Hahn and her contributors cover the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, British Malaya and Ceylon, and the Philippines to undertake nuanced examinations of places and practices; in them, we see the fragmented nature of cultural exchange, as well as its continuous and dynamic evolution. Cecilia L. Chu focuses on Hong Kong to offer fascinating insights into the territory’s history through dual lenses of property and race. Finally, Peter G. Rowe and Yun Fu treat their readers to a magisterial discussion of contemporary architecture (and its roots) in Southeast Asia and beyond (including parts of Austronesia). Their analysis is grounded by examining different influences: Austronesian vernacular; India, China, and Islam; Western colonization; and the postcolonial era of independence. This is an original and rewarding approach because it allows the tracing of currents of knowledge exchange and transfer across the region’s built environment through its long history. ... Read more

The Open Society appeared as a concept in planning discourse at the Congrès
International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM XI). It attempted to create urban
conditions which would allow society to prosper. Despite its good theoretical
intentions, the project did not always translate well into practice. We observe that
historic approaches and tools have tended to be neglected in urban regeneration
projects and discussions, yet we think that they can bring valuable urban
transformations. This paper therefore considers the extent to which historic
planning tools and theories can be useful for assessing built projects to provide
fresh approaches for urban renovation. This paper will reappraise the concept of
the Open Society empirically by analysing, critiquing, and imagining its relevance
in twenty-first-century planning projects and discourse. This research uses a
mostly qualitative approach through critical cartographies as a main medium and
to draw conclusions that highlight the power relations in the Dutch neighbourhood
of ‘t Hool (Eindhoven) as well as the local conditions and materials that can enable
them to plan for a more resilient future. We aim to bridge the gap between theory
and practice through a methodology that allows for a broader and deeper
understanding of place, history, potentials, and urgencies. ... Read more

Based on the understanding of the built environment as result of competing claims on space that must be resolved via recognition, fair distribution of burdens and benefits of our human association, respect and care for the planet and just procedures to decide on those claims, Spatial Planning and Strategy is a chair in the Department of Urbanism within the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology, committed to helping create sustainability, resilience and spatial justice through the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, the Paris Climate Agreement and the European New Deal, among other frameworks. This commitment is reflected in activities, events, and courses. We are concerned with knowledge about the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of strategic and urban planning tools – visions, strategies, plans and programmes. ... Read more