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This paper explores urban recovery as a participatory bottom-up process that highlights the importance and social significance of spaces of shared memories in reconstituting the built as well as the sociocultural fabrics of a place. It examines the multiple modes of engaging local communities in the process of recovering and rehabilitating shared public spaces, including organizing workshops to identify a space of common social significance, co-designing and co-producing a spatial intervention, and maintaining the intervention over the long term. The paper focuses on Karantina, a neighborhood in Beirut that became the site of post-disaster recovery in the aftermath of the Beirut Port blast in August 2020, and the spatial intervention that the urban recovery team at the Beirut Urban Lab implemented in the sub-neighborhood of Al-Khodor. In doing so, the paper contributes experiences from recent work on participatory modes of engaging the local community groups in Al-Khodor. It highlights the importance of community participation in researching, designing, implementing, and maintaining spatial interventions in the near absence of an active government in a country such as Lebanon.

Shared (electric) mobility is still facing challenges in terms of reaching its potential as a sustainable mobility solution. Low physical and digital integration with public transport, a lack of charging infrastructure, the regulatory barriers, and the public nuisance are hindering the uptake and organization of shared mobility services. This study examines the case of the shared mobility hub, a location where shared mobility is concentrated, as a solution to overcome these challenges. To find ideas informing how a network of shared mobility hubs can contribute to sustainable urban mobility and to overcome the aforementioned challenges, a business model innovation approach was adopted. Focus groups, consisting of public and private stakeholders, collaboratively designed five business model (BM) blueprints, reaching a consensus about the value creation, delivery, and capture mechanisms of the network. The blueprints, defined as first-/last-mile, clustered, point-of-interest (POI), hybrid, and closed mobility hub networks, provide alternative solutions to integrate sustainable transportation modes into a coherent network, enabling multi- and intermodal travel behaviour, and supporting interoperability, sustainable land use, and ensured access to shared (electric) travel modes. However, which kind of network the local key stakeholders need to commit to depends on the local policy goals and regulatory context.

Shared e-scooters refer to a micro-mobility service that enables the short rentals of e-scooters. The rapid growth of e-scooter sharing has sparked a heated discussion about its role in the urban mobility sector. This article presents a systematic review of the current knowledge on its uses and users, health and environmental impacts, and policy issues. The analysis is based on academic literature, identified with Google Scholar by using keywords and publication years from 2017, and relevant gray literature. Firstly, we highlight that the profiles of e-scooter renters seem to highly match the characteristics of other micro-mobility services users. Secondly, e-scooters are often associated with a high perception of risk from the public and an increasing occurrence of related road accidents. Thirdly, even if promoted as a green mobility option, the true environmental impact of shared e-scooters has only started to be investigated. Early studies point out negative impacts around their production, usage, and maintenance. Fourthly, the integration of shared e-scooters into the existing transport systems requires policy changes, both at the local and national level, including traffic regulations, safety rules, and physical infrastructure. Finally, this paper reveals the ambiguity of the term “e-scooter” and stresses the need for more research, as the future of cities is tied to the development of low-car lifestyles.

This paper critically examines the ethics of attributing national identity to architecture, focusing on how built form becomes a medium of cultural representation. While architecture often reflects collective memory and tradition, assigning it an exclusive ethnic or national label risks obscuring its pluralistic origins and shared authorship. Through theoretical reflection and firsthand experience, the study explores how monuments, motifs, and civic spaces can be appropriated into political narratives, often undermining inclusivity and nuanced interpretation. Drawing on global examples and nationalist framings in the Balkans, the paper highlights how identity becomes embedded in form, reinforcing symbolic boundaries. Particular attention is given to Skanderbeg Square in Skopje, where its transformation from an inclusive civic platform to an ethnonational site illustrates the fragile balance between cultural specificity and public function. This case reflects wider trends in which public space is instrumentalized to serve dominant narratives. The paper argues for reflective design practices that engage with history and culture without collapsing into exclusivity. It calls for recognizing the layered and transnational character of architectural meaning as essential in pluralistic societies, especially in contexts marked by ethnic or political division. Methodologically, the paper adopts a qualitative, theoretical-analytical approach combining critical literature review with reflexive case-based analysis drawn from the author’s professional involvement, offering an original ethical perspective on architectural representation in multicultural contexts.

The present paper investigates the location pattern of co-working spaces in Delhi which is absent in the existing body of knowledge. Delhi is a political, administrative, educational, scientific and innovation capital that accommodates many co-working spaces in India. We developed Ordinary least squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models to understand the associations of co-working spaces of digital labourers with other urban socio-economic, services and lifestyle variables in Delhi using secondary data for 117 coworking locations in 280 municipal wards of NCT-Delhi. Model diagnostic suggested that the GWR model provides additional information regarding geographical distribution of coworking spaces, and density of bars, median house rent, fitness centres, metro train stations, restaurants, cinemas, cafés, and creative enterprises are statistically significant parameters to estimate them. The importance of coworking spaces has increased in the post-disaster period, so this study informs public policies to benefit people and companies who choose coworking routes, and recommends urban planners, developers, and real-estate professionals to consider the proximity of creative industries in planning and developing coworking spaces in the future. Also, in the post COVID-19 period, to increase local jobs and long-term place sustainability, a localised policy intervention for coworking spaces in Delhi is highly recommended.

The use of autonomous vehicles (AVs) has the potential to transform users’ behaviour and urban space management. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of impacts require a scenario building method. We considered the fleet size, modal share, car ownership, parking preferences, and urban space repurposing during the elaboration of a novel method. Existing scenarios and results of a questionnaire survey have been used as sources. The method was applied to build scenarios in a case study in Budapest, Hungary. The results were used to calculate the impacts on urban space management, including environmental savings. The key findings are: scenarios with significant shared AV use show that parking demand may be minimised (almost 83%) and urban space repurposing has the highest potential; furthermore, AV use and sharing acceptability may decrease the fleet size and alter the type of shared mode to multiple occupancies. The developed scenario building method serves as a base for future studies. The produced scenarios allow the researchers to focus on the analysis of the impacts caused.

Pedestrian Priority Street (PPS) project, launched to encourage safer and more convenient walking by improving the inferior pedestrian environment on narrow streets without sidewalks, is based on Monderman’s shared space concept. Similar to the shared space approach, PPS aims for mutual consideration between pedestrians and drivers and strives to create a pedestrian-friendly environment, but the project relies on a unique road surface design. Considering the two main goals of the PPS project, this study investigated how subjective safety and pedestrians’ movements differed by design types. To analyze safety perception, ordered Logit regression and post-hoc interviews were conducted with visual assessment survey using recorded VR (virtual reality) videos. Next, trace mapping and analysis were performed based on the video recordings to measure the degree of free walking. The results found that pedestrians perceived higher safety level in PPSs than in general back road. Further, the pedestrians moved more freely in the street with an integrated design. In other types, which suggested a pedestrian zone at the roadside, there was not much difference in behavior from the general back roads. Thus, the design principle of PPS, which does not set a boundary between pedestrian and vehicle area, should be observed to lead to behavioral changes in pedestrians.

Tourist villages are constructed as a means for reducing the stress caused by the rapid changes in modern life by providing a comfortable environment for users to integrate with. Nevertheless, many villages cannot achieve a satisfactory performance level due to the ignorance of urban designers of the relationship between humans and their environment and its impact on developing successful urban spaces. This paper aims to analyze and measure the impact of humanitarian needs on the spatial formation of shared urban spaces in three tourist villages on the Northern Coast in Egypt, as it is one of the significant areas that the government and the private sector focus on developing and considering as a domestic and international touristic area. Furthermore, the study uses different quantitative techniques to achieve its goals, such as spatial analysis and data analysis of user questionnaires using SPSS to measure the factors that affect each need. The study’s findings place special emphasis on the connection between spatial formation’s capacity for meeting and satisfying user needs. Moreover, the results highlight design criteria that contribute to creating responsive urban spaces and should be considered by urban designers to achieve the highest performance quality in these shared spaces and generate social sustainability.

Streets with an increasingly important place function play a significant role in the contemporary discourse on sustainable cities. The paper addresses urban streets that, observed from the urban planning perspective, have the potential to be transformed into either commercial or residential shared streets. After defining urban planning parameters identified as characteristic of shared streets, streets were quantified based on an analysis of the existing shared streets in Central Europe. By setting up distinctive scenarios that could help to detect specific types of streets, open spatial datasets were used for the mapping and identification of streets that could be transformed into shared streets. The methodology was tested on the example of the city of Maribor in Slovenia. The results of the research show that the selected urban planning parameters can help to identify streets with transformation potential, whereas the basic parameters, such as the building use and the length and width of the street, help us to better understand the urban fabric in which street spaces acquire new functions. The presented mapping method could serve as a testing tool for experts, planners, decision-makers, and the interested public to identify potential street transformations.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of platform-based “shared mobility services” (SMS) such as car-, bike-, and e-scooter-sharing in many cities in Germany and around the world. At the same time, these services have become the subject of intense debates: Are they replacing private car travel, thus contributing to sustainable mobility in cities? Or are they drawing users away from public transit and cycling while obstructing public space? From the perspective of sustainable mobility politics, it seems far from clear which role these new services could play in transitioning to a less car-centric mobility system. While a number of potential effects and ensuing governance issues of shared mobility services (e.g., regarding questions of equitable access, data governance, the role of public versus private actors) have already been studied, this article explores the role of shared mobility services (SMS) in triggering system dynamics and feedback loops in the context of sustainability transitions. The article connects questions regarding the sustainability effects of “shared mobility services” with the role of “push” measures to reduce private car traffic in cities. Using a theoretical framework from socio-technical transitions research and from the sociology of technology, it describes the recent growth of shared mobility services in Berlin as an example of the upscaling dynamics of socio-technical niche innovations. Drawing on a series of workshops with mobility service providers and representatives of public authorities, it analyses the potential for conflict as well as for coalition-building between service providers and public authorities. Based on the theoretical concept of the role of feedback loops and windows of opportunity for transitions, it shows how the market growth of shared mobility services has added momentum to an already ongoing political debate over the legitimate use of public space in Berlin. Against this backdrop, the article discusses how growing numbers of car-, bike-, and e-scooter-sharing vehicles could open up windows of opportunity for re-distributing space away from private cars. The article concludes that supporting and regulating SMS will be key to steering their growth in the direction of sustainability.