[Special Issue] Land Planning Toward Climate Adaptation: Design and Strategy for Urban Heat Island Mitigation

🔥 How can land planning become a real instrument for reducing urban heat, rather than simply documenting it?

As heatwaves intensify, the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is increasingly a question of how we plan land, streets, neighborhoods, vegetation, and urban form. Yet many cities still lack integrated planning frameworks that translate urban climate knowledge into concrete spatial and design decisions.

Together with Mohamed Elhadi Matallah, Waqas Ahmed Mahar, and Atef Ahriz, I am pleased to serve as Guest Editor of the Special Issue in Land:

📗 “Land Planning Toward Climate Adaptation: Design and Strategy for Urban Heat Island Mitigation”

Our aim is to connect urban climate science with planning and design action. We particularly welcome rigorous studies addressing:

• Climate-sensitive land-use planning and zoning • Urban morphology, geometry, density, and ventilation corridors • Nature-based solutions and green-blue infrastructure • Urban forestry, shading, and water-sensitive design • Cool and reflective materials and urban surface properties • Outdoor thermal comfort and heat-related health risks • Remote sensing and GIS-based UHI and land-surface-temperature mapping • CFD and numerical urban microclimate modeling • AI and machine learning for urban heat forecasting • Digital twins for climate adaptation and heat-resilient planning

The important question is no longer simply where cities are hot. We need evidence showing which planning and design interventions work, by how much, at what spatial scale, and under present and future climate conditions.

I am particularly interested in contributions that move beyond descriptive UHI mapping toward quantitative, transferable, and decision-relevant evidence that planners, urban designers, landscape architects, and policymakers can actually use.

If you are working on urban heat mitigation, outdoor thermal comfort, climate-responsive urban design, or heat-resilient land planning, we would be pleased to consider your work.

📆 Submission deadline: February 3, 2027

📚 Research articles, reviews, and short communications are invited. Authors may also submit a proposed title and short abstract to the Editorial Office for preliminary assessment.

🔗 Special Issue https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land/special_issues/CT8J462BL8

📚 Sustainable Building Design Lab https://www.sbd.uliege.be

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