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