Recent international policy advocating for social innovation to be part of strategies to promote sustainable urban development has energised this emerging body of literature. However, there is a need for more sector-specific research to integrate findings on the spatiality of social innovation, cooperative processes, and place-scale relations. This article presents a review (2002-2018) of social innovation in urban spaces. Based on data from 114 publications, the review indicates that research in the spatiality of social innovation can be grouped into three major themes: 1) Spatial planning and community development; 2) Governance; 3) Co-production and service design. The findings suggest that in general the collaboration of end users in place-based development are central to this process of urban change and that process is as significant as the outcome.

Improving microclimate can be a critical consideration when designing urban places, especially in hot arid climates, due to its relation to improving human comfort in outdoor places, mitigating urban heat island effect and reducing indoors air conditioning demand. This study set out to investigate the impact of urban design strategies on microclimate, specifically canyon ratio, orientation, vegetation shading and wind speed using the case study of Al Ain City in the UAE. Simulations using Grasshopper with OpenStudio, EnergyPlus and Radiance plugins were carried out, and the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) was employed. Larger canyon ratios (1 to 2) and North-South street orientation were found to produce more comfortable urban places.While shading surfaces were found to have the potential to reduce UTCI by 5 o C. Moreover, creating wind passages on the ground floor of the urban area was found to significantly enhance wind circulation in the scheme, reducing UTCI. This study can serve as an input for urban planning decision-making as well as provide guidance for urban designers in hot arid climates.

Urban populations are increasing at a rate that challenges existing public health infrastructures, while contemporary literature proliferates in the attempt to identify links between city neighbourhoods and health and well-being. Despite this, there have been few attempts to synthesize research into neighbourhood features perceived by elderly residents to affect their health and well-being. The primary objective of this review is to establish whether and, if so, how the perception of urban environment features acts as health and well-being determinants in an ageing population. Data extracted from 49 eligible articles into five key neighbourhood domains and thematic analysis show that poor health and reduced activity are associated with negatively perceived environments. In addition, urban social cohesion, crime and safety influences activity choices. Higher activity is associated with more compact and varied land-use mix with appealing aesthetics. Isolating individual perceived neighbourhood features as directly associated health determinants among the elderly is complex due to interrelations and overlap between domains. Identification of perceived environment health and well-being barriers or facilitators by the elderly are under-represented and warrants further investigation. Participatory objective and subjective research will contribute towards a more robust evidence base for public health professionals and policymakers by identifying knowledge gaps.

Urban agriculture (UA) can be used as an action to promote sustainability in cities and inform public health policies for urban populations. Despite this growing recognition, its implementation still presents challenges in countries in the Global North and Global South. Background: In this context, this systematic review aims to identify the development of frameworks for the implementation of UA as a sustainable action and its main opportunities and shortcomings in meeting urban socio-environmental demands. Methods: In this review, using the PRISMA protocol, we evaluated 26 studies on the interplay between UA and sustainability surveyed on the Web of Science to provide an overview of the state of the art. Conclusions: In summary, it was possible to identify many key challenges in UA adoption, which regard air and soil contamination, availability of green areas, layout of urban infrastructure, food distribution, among others. Due to numerous socio-economic and environmental contextual factors in cities, especially when comparing realities of the Global North and Global South, there is a need to develop a model that can be adaptable to these different contexts. Thus, it is recognized that the concept of sustainability does not present a universal understanding and that in its search it could be argued that one of the most important gaps is still to address social issues in relation to environmental ones.

#.U KCWBBYXNZU Green Wedges: Origins and Development in Britain Introduction The origins of park system planning in the second half of the nineteenth century and its subsequent development have been widely debated within the literature. Dal Co 1 pointed out that since their inception park systems were essential instruments of planning and Dümpelmann 2 elaborated on how they soon became central to planning debates across the Western world. Out of the myriad of types of green spaces emerging then, the greenbelt has received abundant attention. But while its importance has been thoroughly examined, 3 a review of the literature shows that relatively little is known about the 'green wedge'-even though planners widely discussed the idea in the first half of the twentieth century. Aiming at contributing to fill this gap, this paper focuses on the history of the green wedge in Britain. Central to our argument is the fact that the green wedge played a fundamental role as a new element of park system proposals, since it emerged from the idea of radial parks, in the late 1900s, to gain widespread recognition as a valid alternative or complement to the greenbelt in interwar Britain. Green wedges were proposed as ducts of green space from the countryside right into the centre of a city or town. The wedge form would funnel air, sunlight and greenery inside the urban fabric regardless of urban sprawl, as the wedge could likewise expand. If the greenbelt was physically a peripheral element around a town thought, among other things, to control urban growth and to separate urban and rural areas, the green wedge aimed to provide salubrious intra-urban green space and a through connection to the countryside. The paper sets out to contextualise the precedents of the green wedge idea in relation to the history of park systems and their integration with traffic systems. Secondly, it focuses on how the concept became recognised as a distinct typology of radial green space in Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century. It emphasises the role of the 1910 RIBA Town Planning Conference in the dissemination of the concept and its immediate reception. Subsequently, the paper considers how green wedges permeated British planning debates up to the Second World War, including how individual actors-such as T. H. Mawson, H. V. Lanchester, P. Abercrombie and R. Unwin-attempted to implement them. The paper considers both texts and plans, and focuses on early twentieth-century proposals for London. Origins of the green wedges idea According to Giedion, 4 the task of bringing air, sunlight and greenery to the urban environment was a priority for the first modern planners. Overcrowding, poor housing, urban sprawl, pollution, unsanitary conditions, lack of green spaces and congestion were common aspects of industrial cities, particularly across England and Germany. 5