The rapid development of Chinese megacities in the last decades have been mainly characterized by top-down planning and large-scale urban development and redevelopment, as well as by using place-making as a tool for city branding. This approach has also been used in other countries and has been constantly criticized for replacing old neighborhoods. In recent years, alternative development modes and participative approaches in urban regeneration practices have emerged in cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. This paper investigates participative urban regeneration cases in Yangpu District, located in Shanghai, and the Dalang subdistrict in Shenzhen. Both case studies are located at the urban–rural interface, where past industrialization processes have resulted in complex sociospatial conditions. The primary focus was to analyze the governance aspects in the cases, such as the enabling factors that allow the participative approach to emerge in these projects and their governance model. This paper concludes on the importance of civil society organizations and the incorporation of social objectives in emerging participative regeneration practices.

The concept of circular economy (CE) is high on the agenda of many planning agencies in European countries. It has also become a prominent issue in European academic education institutions. It is expected that spatial planning and design can support and add the spatial quality dimension of such a transition towards CE. However, incorporating the concept of CE in an integrative manner in urban design and planning courses is challenging because of its metabolic and complex nature. This article presents the first results of integrating design-teaching activities at a faculty of architecture with an H2020-financed research project. The integration of research and design education provided the students with a situated and indeed transdisciplinary learning environment. Students understood that they needed to address challenges from a systemic perspective rather early in the design process, meaning to understand what the relations between different subsystems and their spatial structures are. Furthermore, the experiment provided evidence that the eco-innovative solutions developed by the students are seen as an effective option to achieve objectives for a transition towards CE by stakeholders.

Mega-event strategies and their impact on the development of host cities have drawn increasing interest as they have become part of wider city development strategies. Studies of mega-event strategies have tended to focus on a single perspective such as economic rationale and impact. As greater attention is paid to their long-term impact, there is a need for more comprehensive evaluation combining economic, social and environmental perspectives, and assessing the management of competing objectives. This paper proposes a comprehensive analytical framework for examining the multiple long-term impacts of mega-events on host cities. It illustrates the use of the framework through two examples of the Summer Olympics as the archetypal mega-event.

This article contributes to the discussion about learning from group methods in design education. Based on action research results, it presents and reflects on teaching activities related to urban and regional design in TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, conducted and coordinated by the authors. Constructive alignment of the teaching triangle and feedbacks from students and teachers are used to assess the effectiveness of learning from group methods in these courses from the perspective of teaching quality. The evaluation does not aim for revealing missing components or links in theory on design education. Instead, it is using existing theories to analyse education practices, for a better understanding and performance of group work in a specific field of design education. The conclusions of the article focus on pros and cons of group work in urban and regional design education, with highlighted common challenges for teaching, such as assessment on individual performance, as well as specific ones, such as stimulating ‘out of the box thinking’ and supervising interdisciplinary groups.

Increased surface runoff generated in urban areas due to larger proportion of impervious surfaces has, in many cases, exceeded the capacity of urban drainage systems. In response to such challenge, this paper introduces the quantitative analysis of pluvial flood alleviation by open surface water systems in the case of Almere in the Netherlands and compares it with Tianjin Eco-City in China, with the aim of optimizing land use planning and urban design for new urban districts. The methodology is a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis. With the analytical tool of ArcGIS, the authors have investigated the influence of spatial distribution of surface water system on the reduction of pluvial flood risks. The conclusions include some preliminary principles: (1) a densely distributed surface water network is preferable; (2) areas farther away from water body require water sensitive spatial intervention; and (3) optimizing the allocation of different types of ground surface could contribute to pluvial flood alleviation. An alternative design proposal for a typical urban block in Tianjin Eco-City has been put forward to illustrate these principles.

This paper aims to demonstrate how ‘research by design,’ which is an approach bridging research, design, and planning, can help unpack the complexity of today’s metropolitan challenges by considering the resource flows and processes that were omitted by traditional ways of planning. This is crucial for circular developments. By reporting the experience of two university design studios across Europe, this paper can contribute to a better understanding and imagination of desirable future scenarios of resilient regions. The experiments carried out in the Regional design studio: ‘Spatial Strategies for the Global Metropolis’ held at TU Delft are described alongside with the exercises carried out in the design studio ‘Laboratory of Urbanism’ of the MAPA Course, held at DiARC UNINA. Both courses focused on the regeneration of wastescapes as a fundamental part of holistic adaptation strategies for more resilient and circular regions. Climate change issues related to resilience thinking have been interwoven with other complex challenges such as the co-existence of wastescapes and land scarcity as well as spatial injustice. Through a ‘research by design’ approach, these different aspects are brought together to achieve a holistic approach for urban resilience.