Data infrastructures, economic processes, and governance models of digital platforms are increasingly pervading urban sectors and spheres of urban life. This phenomenon is known as platformization, which has in turn given rise to the phenomena of platform society, where platforms have permeated the core of urban societies. A recent manifestation of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform project launched by Meta (formerly Facebook) as a globally operating platform company. The Metaverse represents an idea of a hypothetical “parallel virtual world” that incarnate ways of living and working in virtual cities as an alternative to smart cities of the future. Indeed, with emerging innovative technologies—such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, the IoT, and Digital Twins—providing rich datasets and advanced computational understandings of human behavior, the Metaverse has the potential to redefine city designing activities and service provisioning towards increasing urban efficiencies, accountabilities, and quality performance. However, there still remain ethical, human, social, and cultural concerns as to the Metaverse’s influence upon the quality of human social interactions and its prospective scope in reconstructing the quality of urban life. This paper undertakes an upper-level literature review of the area of the Metaverse from a broader perspective. Further, it maps the emerging products and services of the Metaverse, and explores their potential contributions to smart cities with respect to their virtual incarnation, with a particular focus on the environmental, economic, and social goals of sustainability. This study may help urban policy makers to better understand the opportunities and implications of the Metaverse upon tech-mediated practices and applied urban agendas, as well as assess the positives and negatives of this techno-urban vision. This paper also offers thoughts regarding the argument that the Metaverse has disruptive and substantive effects on forms of reconstructing reality in an increasingly platformized urban society. This will hopefully stimulate prospective research and further critical perspectives on the topic.

As the Coronavirus (COVID-19) expands its impact from China, expanding its catchment into surrounding regions and other countries, increased national and international measures are being taken to contain the outbreak. The placing of entire cities in ‘lockdown’ directly affects urban economies on a multi-lateral level, including from social and economic standpoints. This is being emphasised as the outbreak gains ground in other countries, leading towards a global health emergency, and as global collaboration is sought in numerous quarters. However, while effective protocols in regard to the sharing of health data is emphasised, urban data, on the other hand, specifically relating to urban health and safe city concepts, is still viewed from a nationalist perspective as solely benefiting a nation’s economy and its economic and political influence. This perspective paper, written one month after detection and during the outbreak, surveys the virus outbreak from an urban standpoint and advances how smart city networks should work towards enhancing standardization protocols for increased data sharing in the event of outbreaks or disasters, leading to better global understanding and management of the same.

Predictive computing tools are increasingly being used and have demonstrated successfulness in providing insights that can lead to better health policy and management. However, as these technologies are still in their infancy stages, slow progress is being made in their adoption for serious consideration at national and international policy levels. However, a recent case evidences that the precision of Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven algorithms are gaining in accuracy. AI modelling driven by companies such as BlueDot and Metabiota anticipated the Coronavirus (COVID-19) in China before it caught the world by surprise in late 2019 by both scouting its impact and its spread. From a survey of past viral outbreaks over the last 20 years, this paper explores how early viral detection will reduce in time as computing technology is enhanced and as more data communication and libraries are ensured between varying data information systems. For this enhanced data sharing activity to take place, it is noted that efficient data protocols have to be enforced to ensure that data is shared across networks and systems while ensuring privacy and preventing oversight, especially in the case of medical data. This will render enhanced AI predictive tools which will influence future urban health policy internationally.

The ‘15-minute city’ concept is emerging as a potent urban regeneration model in post-pandemic cities, offering new vantage points on liveability and urban health. While the concept is primarily geared towards rethinking urban morphologies, it can be furthered via the adoption of Smart Cities network technologies to provide tailored pathways to respond to contextualised challenges through the advent of data mining and processing to better inform urban decision-making processes. We argue that the ‘15-minute city’ concept can value-add from Smart City network technologies in particular through Digital Twins, Internet of Things (IoT), and 6G. The data gathered by these technologies, and processed via Machine Learning techniques, can unveil new patterns to understand the characteristics of urban fabrics. Collectively, those dimensions, unpacked to support the ‘15-minute city’ concept, can provide new opportunities to redefine agendas to better respond to economic and societal needs as well as align more closely with environmental commitments, including the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda. This perspective paper presents new sets of opportunities for cities arguing that these new connectivities should be explored now so that appropriate protocols can be devised and so that urban agendas can be recalibrated to prepare for upcoming technology advances, opening new pathways for urban regeneration and resilience crafting.

Historical and cultural blocks in Chinese historic districts are important components of sustainable heritage tourism. In towns along the Grand Canal, historical and cultural blocks are generally integrated with modern commerce, forming a complex space characterized by multi-elements, multi-cultures, and multi-functions. The understanding of tourists’ spatial cognition thus becomes extremely important to support heritage conservation and encourage sustainable heritage tourism. This study proposes a space syntax-based methodology to help inform heritage consultants and urban designers in understanding the tourists’ spatial cognition of canal town cultural blocks, and thereby assists designers and managers in identifying where cognitive experiences can be improved. The proposed method is applied to Nanyang, which is a canal town currently in decline in Shandong Province, and is contrasted with the ancient town of Wuzhen in Zhejiang Province, China, a highly successful tourist town. By using this proposed method, the relationship between street networks and tourists’ spatial cognition has been explored. The results of the analysis were evaluated in order to inform a range of design concepts that could enhance the sustainable heritage tourism experience of these two towns.

While the topic of climate change is of global importance and has global consequences, the context is far more dangerous for emerging economies, including small island developing states (SIDS) and their coastal cities. The literature supports the need for robustness in infrastructural dimensions of such economies. However, the preparatory economic aspects have been overlooked in favour of post-impact disaster management studies by many countries. The latter studies have also focused upon the need for heavy financial investments without investigating solutions for economic strengthening of those economies including climate change mitigation and affordability. As such, emerging SIDS economies have struggled to meet these obligations from their internal finances that draw predominantly from tax revenue sources and foreign aid thereby often leading to increased debts contributing to economic austerity and decreasing liveability levels when repayment commitments fail. Public-private partnerships (PPP), another sought-after loan strategy, which often attracts foreign direct investment (FDI), can work if PPPs are carefully designed within strict public monitoring criteria. However, their applicability needs to be expanded to include the wider social strata of a city to ensure inclusivity and cohesiveness, and formulated to contribute to a wider urban regeneration agenda. This paper proposes a more inclusive framework bridging governance with drivers for sustainable development, using urban heritage and culture as a strategic thread for debt repayment and economic empowerment through PPP. This paper seeks to inform policymakers on sustainable pathways as it relates to SIDS cultural heritage conservation policies and practices towards better economic resilience in the wake of climate change.