Digitalisation and the future city paradigm are becoming a trend in recent research and practices. Literature discusses digitalisation and its applications as the main gear in the transformation to the ideal future city vision. Yet, the concept of digitalisation is articulated in many interpretations and presented in different applications in the built environment. One emerging application is digital twinning. Literature envisions the potential of digital twinning applications in the urban realm and discusses the cognitive city model and its implications on the future of our cities, its urban realm and the built environment in general. With the evolving themes on the ideal future city model, this systematic review tackles the following questions: what are the key motives and drivers of the future city paradigm; what is a city digital twin; and what are their expected applications. Additionally, how literature envisions the definition of the city users and their experience in the urban realm of the city of the future. This review article explores related literature on the themes of future city model, digital urban realm, digital twinning and city users. The main findings are: identifying key gears of the future city model in literature, exploring city digital twin conceptualization and applications and discussing concepts on the definition of city user and user experience in the city of the future.

Passive cooling strategies have long been used in vernacular and traditional architecture practices. Today, with the surge in energy consumption, excessive carbon emissions and lingering climate change challenges, the shift to passive solutions to heat and cool buildings is crucial. Despite this urgency, we heavily rely on electricity and gas to maintain thermal comfort inside buildings. Since heating and cooling accounts for 40% of household energy use, devising passive strategies in housing design can make a significant difference in energy consumption. This paper explores the characteristics of Iranian traditional housing that contribute to making indoor spaces thermally comfortable. The examination of sustainable strategies used in seven case studies in the hot and dry climate of Iran indicates that such measures have a significant impact on the microclimate of traditional houses and considerably reduce the need for electricity and mechanical power. The study suggests that designing tall, north-facing walls, large and shallow pools in the courtyards, multiple openings in the courtyard-facing wall in the same room, stack-cooling for instigating the convective air movement, night purge ventilation, dome ceilings, earth coupling and using thermally massive materials, as well as seasonal relocation across the courtyard are among the most important strategies for mitigating the heat in Iranian houses. Finally, this work puts forward a set of recommendations to improve the passive design of future buildings in hot and arid climates.

While there are many environmental education programs for children, few studies have used an appropriately developed scale for evaluating how such education might have on impact on children's environmental orientations. The research presented in this article adapted the NEP (New Ecological Paradigm) for Children scale to develop a new instrument for measuring children's environmental attitudes: the NEP (Children@School). The NEP (Children@School) has been developed by analysing the impact of the design of physical learning spaces on children's environmental attitudes. Factor analysis indicated that NEP (Children@School) has three dimensions: Children's Environmental Attitudes towards Human Intervention, Children's Environmental Attitudes via ESD at School, and Children's Environmental Attitudes towards Eco-Rights. We argue that NEP (Children@School) can meaningfully measure the impact of learning spaces on children's environmental attitudes. While the instrument was developed for use in Australia, it has been designed for global applicability.