Track 1: Limitless cities and urban futures: Planning for scale (Congress Team: Wenjing Luo and Peter Newman)

• Reasons why megacities and city regions are growing and leading planetary urbanisation
• Global influence and competitiveness: the role of megacities
• Megacities as leaders in low impact energy, food, and resources consumption
• Linkages, relationships, disparities, synergies and connections: opportunities for the whole and its parts
• Prospects, visions, futures, predictions, forecasts and scenarios for megacities in the future

Track 2: Besides the megacity and the role of the other cities and areas: Planning for balance (Congress Team: Tathagata Chatterji and Fedor Kudryavtsev)

• Role & future of cities that aim for balance rather than limitless scale in the global race towards agglomeration advantage
• Alternatives to the megacity through regional networked urban clusters
  The megacity backside: shrinking settlements, disappearing villages and other similar externalities
• Planning for spatial balance: rural-agrarian productivity, wildlife and urbanisation equilibrium of metropolitan areas
• Neither urban nor rural: emerging life styles, urban forms and economics beyond megacities

Track 3: Livable places and healthy cities: Planning for people (Congress Team: Mahak Agrawal and Jens Aerts

• Health, safety, prosperity for the well-being of all (including children, elderly, and vulnerable people)
• Environmental justice, spatial equity, hope and opportunities for all in a megacity
  Digital connectivity as opportunity for better life and as a tool to measure and promote well-being
• Livability and affordability of housing, transportation and services
• Collective space and building the community (formal and informal)
  Frameworks and tools to measure livability
• Planning with people and communities: universal design, co-production and open data
  Livability as a universal or cultural value

Track 4: Knowledge economies and identity: Planning for culture (Congress Team: Nasim Iranmanesh and Piotr Lorens)

• The value of locality and identity to the globalizing world
• Local identities and cultures as assets within the megacity
• Unspoken pasts: the role and legacy of colonial heritage
• Knowledge as the foundation of a high-value urban economy
• Culture, heritage and identity as economic drivers
• Tourism as consumption or tourism as a promoter of locality

Track 5: Smart futures and sustainability: Planning for innovation (Congress Team: Dorota Kamrowska-Zaluska and Awais Piracha)

• Smart cities, automatisation, financing and technological advances
• Shared and inclusive innovative economies and digital transformation
• Citizen-focused smart services
• Disruptive and sharing technologies and their impact
• Strategic and real-time data-based policy and data management
• New mobility and its influence on urban form
• New work, co-working and co-living

Track 6: Changing environment and risk: Planning for resilience (Congress Team: Olusola Olugemi and Markus Appenzeller)

• Climate change and sinking cities
• Vulnerability to disasters and how that can be mitigated
• Waste, urban footprint
• Re-naturing, biodiversity, and urban metabolism
• Building, evolving, securing quality of life
• Triggering leverage – planning for more than a single purpose

Track 7: Urban governance and planning profession: Planning for the future (Congress Team: Jennilee Kohima and Eric Huybrechts)

• Planning, policy and politics surrounding the megacity
• City production by the people: participation and informality
• Governance: from models to pragmatic paths, from top-down to bottom up approaches
• Addressing the mega-scale and the neighborhood
• Organisation and technical support for managing the megacity
• Taking the lead through diplomacy, branding and international networks
• Non-state actors in urban governance