“Building Resilient Cities and Communities in the face of Climate Change”

In the face of uncertainties associated with climate change, building adaptive capacity and resilience at the city and community level emerges as an essential and timely element of planning. South Africa, and indeed the African continent are not immune to the vagaries of climate change – hence the need to be proactive through the diffusion of knowledge and ideas. Undertaking such measures is critical since it will help to:

  • Build cities and communities that are resilient.
  • Timeously respond to climate change pressures.
  • Design tools for mitigating uncertainties associated with climate change.
  • Design, develop and implement policies and plans that guide development in the face of
    climate change

The uncertainties of climate change require urgent attention in the management of cities coupled with designing, developing and implementation of policy and planning tools that can arrest or mitigate the vagaries of this natural and anthropogenic phenomenon. This equally calls for innovative research and sharing of knowledge in order to further mitigate the negativities associated with the vagaries of climate change. In this regard, building resilient cities and communities seems to be a befitting title that can contribute towards our shared challenge.

The Town and Regional Planning Journal together with SACPLAN, are dedicating a special issue of the journal in 2020 to explore how urban and regional planners can achieve this goal of building resilient cities and communities. This special issue will have a wide range of topics that are related to the building of resilient cities and communities including:

  1. Inclusive Cities
  2. Right to the city
  3. Cities Adaptation
  4. Sustainable Development
  5. Intelligent City Development
  6. Smart City Movement in South Africa
  7. Disaster Mitigation and City Response
  8. Inclusive Economic development
  9. Smart Land use and Land Allocation
  10. Inclusive Livelihood development and Urban Poverty Nexus
  11. Urban Agriculture and City Resilience
  12. Smart Governance and Spatial Planning

We are hereby inviting both scholarly articles as well as review articles (papers that have a strong practical implementation aspect) on the mentioned topics.

Provisional timeline

Submission deadline – draft papers: 28 June 2020
Papers under review: July-August
Comments send to authors: August – September
Author revisions of peer-reviewed papers: October 2020 (two weeks)
Special issue published: December 2020

Journal Contact details
More information on the journal and guidelines on the formatting of papers 

Further links:

Submissions   /   Author Agreement    /   Publishing Agreement