Policy documents increasingly identify energy-efficient housing renovation as a global priority that requires implementation at the local level. This article examines the challenges of implementing such energy-efficient renovation strategies in dense, low-income neighbourhoods characterised by a high degree of ownership fragmentation. Focusing on Dortmund–Nordstadt, Germany, the study combines spatial data analysis, policy review, and in-depth engagement with private owners and municipal stakeholders. It explores the specific perspectives of private actors while drawing broader implications for urban planning. The findings highlight the importance of context-sensitive approaches and point to the potential of neighbourhood-specific, low-threshold engagement formats to facilitate action.

Registered providers (RPs) of social housing struggle to build genuinely affordable homes in rural England’s private land market. Land allocated for market development commands a high price in amenity areas. Since 1991, RPs have developed homes on unallocated ‘rural exception sites’ (RESs) in villages, seeking affordable land on which to build homes for local need. However, landowner expectations of the price achievable for these sites have risen, largely because the government has sought to substitute public grants with market mechanisms to achieve project viability. Drawing on research into local practices on RESs, this article explores evolving viability challenges and solutions, concluding with a call to fix land price for affordable housing on rural exception sites.

The main purpose of this study is to analyse current land uses in Samarra (Salahuddin Governorate, Iraq) according to the zoning criteria, to identify the changes that occurred in the 2010–2025 master plan and to pinpoint violations in land uses such as type, area and percentage of illegal uses. The GIS analysis finds that residential use dominates Samarra (37.4 per cent), agricultural use in the master plan has shifted to residential, and congestion has worsened because of a lack of parking spaces (0.1 per cent). Recommendations prioritise strategic expansion in the north-east, redevelopment of slums, and improvement of tourism infrastructure to support sustainable growth.

How can the irruption of ‘rational’ analytical and procedural practices in twentieth-century British town planning be explained? My argument is that what planning histories routinely describe as the ‘systems revolution’ of the 1960s is actually the last phase of a societal epistemic shift associated with early modernism. ‘Planning methodology’ is a historical and transitory object that itself has to be accounted for – what were its conditions of emergence, its distinctive objects? Who could speak of them, and with what techniques and authority? I show that early modern planners sought contemporaneity with the complex, yet in principle decipherable, structure and performance of cities understood as purposeful organisms. Two key crises in the postwar period provided entry points for epistemic transformation: the crisis of the map-form and the crisis of planning administration. Impersonal serial data, and rhizomatic plans, came into existence within and because of a companion discourse on ‘planning methodology’.

Urban densification has become a central policy goal to deliver much-needed housing while reducing net land take. At the same time there has been a significant shift between the role of the state and the market in how to deliver planning outcomes and the type of regulation to achieve densification. This article investigates recent policy changes to promote densification in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, looking at the role of the state in delivering those outcomes and the type of regulation used. We conclude that in order to achieve densification the state has become more proactive, but this was not necessarily the direct result of the proliferation of new legislation but caused by the use of existing instruments of land policy by municipalities. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

COVID-19 lockdowns led to significant shifts in how professional planners operate. The introduction of advanced digital technologies enabled home working and virtual planning processes. An important line of academic inquiry concerns planners’ preparedness in adopting and adapting to digital transformation. Focusing on Northern Ireland, we offer a nuanced analysis of planners’ experiences of digital technologies by drilling into the demographics and competencies within the different planning sectors to disaggregate different types of planners by age, gender, seniority and skills. We present a fine-grained analytical canvas to reveal how different types of planners are experiencing the next stages of digital transformation. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ .

This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nd/4.0 .