Planning a city is a systematic process that includes time, space, and groups of people who must communicate. However, due to security problems in such war-ravaged countries as Afghanistan, the traditional forms of public participation in the planning process are untenable. In particular, due to gathering space difficulties and culture issues in Afghanistan, women and religious minorities are restricted from joining male-dominated powerholders’ face-to-face meetings which are nearly always held in fixed places called masjids (religious buildings). Furthermore, conducting such discussions with human facilitation biases the generation of citizen decisions that stimulates an atmosphere of confrontation, causing another decision problem for urban policy-making institutions. Therefore, it is critical to find approaches that not only securely revolutionize participative processes but also provide meaningful and equal public consultation to support interactions among stakeholders to solve their shared problems together. Toward this end, we propose a joint research program, namely, crowd-based communicative and deliberative e-planning (CCDP), a blended approach, which is a mixture of using an artificial-intelligence-led technology, decision-support system called D-Agree and experimental participatory planning in Kabul, Afghanistan. For the sake of real-world implementation, Nagoya Institute of Technology (Japan) and Kabul Municipality (Afghanistan) have formed a novel developed and developing world partnership by using our proposed methodology as an emerging-deliberation mechanism to reframe public participation in urban planning processes. In the proposed program, Kabul municipality agreed to use our methodology when Kabul city needs to make a plan with people. This digital field study presents the first practical example of using online decision support systems in the context of the neighborhood functions of Gozars, which are Kabul’s social and spatial urban units. The main objective was to harness the wisdom of the crowd to innovative suggestions for helping policymakers making strategic development plans for Gozars using open call ideas, and for responding to equal participation and consultation needs, specifically for women and minorities. This article presents valuable insights into the benefits of this combined approach as blended experience for societies and cities that are suffering long-term distress. This initiative has influenced other local Afghan governments, including the cities of Kandahar and Herat as well as the country’s central government’s ministry of urban planning and land, which has officially expressed its intention to collaborate with us.

The protection of larger built-up areas that constitute sections of actively functioning urban zones is a challenge, even under favourable political and economic conditions. The case of Krakow’s historical town centre, which is protected as a historical site by national law and it was placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites List in 1978, clearly demonstrates how difficult it is to reconcile the passive character of current conservation doctrines with the demands of the free market and growth-oriented economy, when developer pressure is not sufficiently balanced out by public opinion and urban activist movements, when planning tools are incomplete or insufficient, and the criteria according to which strategic decisions are made are of a quantitative rather than a qualitative character. Apart from commonly encountered problems that are associated with the gentrification of town centres or the negative impact of mass tourism, Krakow must also face a growing flood hazard that stems from its specific and unfavourable hydrological and hydrogeological conditions that are compounded by the uncontrolled and uncoordinated expansion of urbanised areas, the decay of the natural environment, and the consequences of climate change. This article presents the multi-aspect site-specific conditions of the historical centre of Krakow, as well as the analysis of its protection as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in the context of flood protection, while taking into consideration the environmental, economic, and social dimension of heritage. The critical conclusions that are featured in the work indicate both areas of possible immediate remedial action and the potential directions that new integrated protection strategies would take.

Community participation is widely acknowledged to be crucial in both mitigation and reconstruction planning, as well as in community-based disaster risk reduction (CBDRR) and community-based disaster mitigation (CBDM) processes. However, despite decades of experience, an efficient framework that is acceptable for all actors and suitable for all different phases of the process—ranging from planning to post-disaster recovery—is lacking. The examples presented in this paper shed light on the different dynamics of participatory design processes and compare situations in which participatory design and community planning were introduced before, during, or after a disastrous or potentially disastrous event. Others emphasize the consequences of participation not being introduced at all. Analysis of these processes allows the authors to speculate on a revised, universal model for participatory planning in vulnerable territories and in the context of risk. By emphasizing intrinsic relations of different elements of the process, particularly the responsibility that different actors are prepared—or forced—to take, this article offers insight towards a framework for post-2020 participatory planning.

Quality of life and well-being are hardly ever an issue when life itself is at stake. The advantages of high-quality walkable streets and public spaces are underestimated when larger problems need to be addressed first and seemingly more serious solutions need to be applied. Hence, a quantitative approach to evacuation route planning and design prevails over a qualitative one or at least a hybrid one. The scope of the ongoing study partially presented in this paper is to find methods for addressing the complicated present and the disastrous future at the same time. The one applied in the case study reported here—Susaki City in Kōchi Prefecture, Japan, which is preparing for the next Nankai earthquake and tsunami, expected sometime soon—was a cycle of active research and international workshops organized in cooperation with the local community and administration. The aim was to understand the challenges that concern the design of dual spaces that are suitable for both everyday life and emergency situations and are connected by walkable spaces. As a result, the paper offers insight into the limits of punctual treatments as well as the relativity of objective and subjective dimensions of urban walkability in the context of risk. Despite the complexity of the issue, a walkable built environment was revealed to be a countermeasure rather than a fad.