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In this study, a diary was developed and used by students to reflect on digital games in geography lessons. The students’ reflection results, through the use of the diary, were compared with reflections without instructional guidance. These results show a significant improvement in reflection through the use of the reflection diary compared to a previous study. Through the combination of lessons, play phases, and the reflection diary, a learning arrangement that enables in-depth reflections at different levels of reflection was created. The medium plays a decisive role by taking the pupils out of their role as players and enabling a critical distance to the game. With the help of the reflection diary, students should be able to better reflect on the game. The reflection diary is integrated into the lessons. It also shows that subject-specific lessons are indispensable for reflecting on the gaming experience in order to counteract subject-specific misconceptions.

In recent years, major sporting and cultural events such as the Olympic Games have emerged as significant elements of public policy, particularly in efforts to achieve urban regeneration. As well as opportunities arising from new venues, these events are viewed as a way of stimulating investment, gaining civic engagement and publicizing progress to assist the urban regeneration process more generally. However, the pursuit of regeneration involving events is a practice that is poorly understood, controversial and risky. Events and Urban Regeneration is the first book dedicated to the use of events in regeneration. It explores the relationship between events and regeneration by analyzing a range of cities and a range of sporting and cultural events projects. It considers various theoretical perspectives to provide insight into why major events are important to contemporary cites. It examines the different ways that events can assist regeneration, as well as problems and issues associated with this unconventional form of public policy. It identifies key issues faced by those tasked with using events to assist regeneration and suggests how practices could be improved in the future. The book adopts a multi-disciplinary perspective, drawing together ideas from the geography, urban planning and tourism literatures, as well as from the emerging events and regeneration fields. It illustrates arguments with a range of international case studies placed within and at the end of chapters to show positive outcomes that have been achieved and examples of high profile failures. This timely book is essential reading for students and practitioners who are interested in events, urban planning, urban geography and tourism.

The cooling effect of green spaces as an ecological solution to mitigate urban climate change is well documented. However, the factors influencing the microclimate in the built environment around forest parks, diurnal variations of their impact and their degree of importance have not been explicitly addressed. We attempted to quantify how much various landscape parameters, including land cover and spatial location, impact the ambient air and surface temperature in the area around Beijing’s Olympic Forest Park. Data were taken along strategically located traverses inside and outside the park. We found: (1) The air temperature during the day was 1.0–3.5 °C lower in the park than in the surrounding area; the surface temperature was 1.7–4.8 °C lower; air humidity in the park increased by 8.7–15.1%; and the human comfort index reduced to 1.8–6.9, all generating a more comfortable thermal environment in the park than in the surrounding area. (2) The distance to the park and the green space ratio of the park’s surrounding area are significant factors for regulating its microclimate. A 1 km increase in distance to the park caused the temperature to increase by 0.83 °C; when the green space ratio increased by 10%, the temperature dropped by 0.16 °C on average. The impact of these two parameters was more obvious in the afternoon than in the middle of the day or in the morning. The green space ratio could be used for designing a more stable thermal environment. (3) Land cover affects surface temperature more than it does air temperature. Our data suggest that an urban plan with an even distribution of green space would provide the greatest thermal comfort.

Studies on city-building games as educational tools show positive results in addressing different learning objectives, but also identify a missing link to reality, as they are mostly computer-based. Given the differences between existing games and their capabilities, the exact function of these games in an urban planning curriculum is unclear. The city-building game Cities: Skylines currently has three different versions (Digital, Tabletop, VR). Through an affordance analysis of the game’s three versions, this study analyses how the versions afford four primary knowledge dimensions, and in doing so identifies different educational applications for each version of Cities: Skylines in different planning disciplines. The results show that: (a) the board game is strong in fostering player participation and critical thinking more suited for the social and health studies, public policy, and citizen participation domains of urban planning; (b) the digital version functions as moddable simulator, ensuring familiarity with existing systems and monitoring their effects, useful in logistics and transportation planning; (c) the VR form viscerally involves players in the simulated processes, applicable in design-focused segments of urban planning, such as sustainable design theory, housing, and land-use management. The results of this study can help urban planning educators identify possible uses for different versions of Cities: Skylines.

This paper examines the emerging multiple centre urban spatial structure in Beijing using housing price variation as an indicator. A random sample of 3783 apartment units was used. These apartments were recent sales in 2001, 2003 and 2005. The dataset included transaction prices and main housing attributes gathered from the Beijing Construction Committee. A hedonic price model was calibrated to investigate the importance of the different urban centres to housing price variations. The results show that multiple urban centres (such as Tian'anmen, CBD, Zhongguancun and the Olympic Centre) explain more of the variations in housing price differences in the metropolitan space than any centre does alone. The findings also reveal changes in impacts from the individual centres in the study period. These outcomes confirm that Beijing is moving towards a polycentric urban form. The emerging multiple urban centres are key factors in understanding the spatial restructuring of Beijing, especially in modelling its emerging housing market.

As games and gamified applications gain prominence in the academic debate on participatory practices, it is worth examining whether the application of such tools in the daily planning practice could be beneficial. This study identifies a research–practice gap in the current state of participatory urban planning practices in three European cities. Planners and policymakers acknowledge the benefits of employing such tools to illustrate complex urban issues, evoke social learning, and make participation more accessible. However, a series of impediments relating to planners’ inexperience with participatory methods, resource constraints, and sceptical adult audiences, limits the broader application of games and gamified applications within participatory urban planning practices. Games and gamified applications could become more widely employed within participatory planning processes when process facilitators become better educated and better able to judge the situations in which such tools could be implemented as part of the planning process, and if such applications are simple and useful, and if their development process is based on co-creation with the participating publics.

Urban green space has been considered as an ecological measure to mitigate urban heat islands (UHI). However, few studies investigate the cooling effect of the adjacent area of the urban park; as the transition region from a green space to a hardened surface where more complex heat exchange occurs, it deserves to be paid more attention. This paper examines the relationship between the urban greening patterns and the cooling effect in the surrounding areas of the Olympic Forest Park in Beijing. Results showed that the forestland and waterbodies could cool 6.51% and 12.82% of the impervious surface temperatures, respectively. For every 10% increase in the green space ratio, the land surface temperature drops by 0.4°C, and per kilometer increase in the distance from the forest park, the land surface temperature increases by 0.15 °C. The aggregation index (AI) and largest patch index (LPI) of the green space patterns presented a strong negative correlation with surface temperature. This study confirms the cooling effects in the adjacent area of the urban park and highlights their dependence on urban greening patterns. Therefore, we should not only develop more green spaces but also scientifically plan their spatial configuration in the limited urban land for the improvement of the cooling effect.

In this study, we examine pollution effects on urban housing prices in China, using a fixed effects 2SLS model on a 13-year (2005–2017) panel dataset of 237 prefecture-level cities. We find that urban housing prices are negatively associated with PM₂.₅ levels, presenting an elasticity of –0.32 for the entire sample. In large cities with an urban population of ≥5 million, the elasticity further increases in absolute value to –0.34, reflecting greater marginal benefit associated with a unit percentage PM₂.₅ reduction in a higher pollution band. In addition, PM₂.₅’s effects on housing markets present temporal variations, and the base elasticity of –0.29 for earlier periods increases to –0.33 in the post-2008 period, reflecting increased public awareness of pollution-caused health risk after the Beijing Olympic Games. In the post-2014 period, however, the elasticity declines to –0.24 with stricter pollution regulations introduced in late 2013 as part of the 12th Five Year Plan. Rational expectations regarding continued air-quality improvement in the future may underlie this trend.

The cultural and geographical properties of the environment have been shown to deeply influence cognition and mental health 1 – 6 . Living near green spaces has been found to be strongly beneficial 7 – 11 , and urban residence has been associated with a higher risk of some psychiatric disorders 12 – 14 —although some studies suggest that dense socioeconomic networks found in larger cities provide a buffer against depression 15 . However, how the environment in which one grew up affects later cognitive abilities remains poorly understood. Here we used a cognitive task embedded in a video game 16 to measure non-verbal spatial navigation ability in 397,162 people from 38 countries across the world. Overall, we found that people who grew up outside cities were better at navigation. More specifically, people were better at navigating in environments that were topologically similar to where they grew up. Growing up in cities with a low street network entropy (for example, Chicago) led to better results at video game levels with a regular layout, whereas growing up outside cities or in cities with a higher street network entropy (for example, Prague) led to better results at more entropic video game levels. This provides evidence of the effect of the environment on human cognition on a global scale, and highlights the importance of urban design in human cognition and brain function. An analysis of spatial navigation in nearly 400,000 people shows, by measuring their performance in a video game, that individuals who grew up outside cities are better at navigation than those who grew up in cities.

City-building games are very popular, on both digital and analog platforms. However, analog games named after cities are a tradition in modern board games. These games, resulting from the game design innovations of the last decades, are engaging a growing number of players worldwide. We wanted to understand what drives players and game designers to develop games that have a direct connection with cities or urban matters. We intend to explore them and identify their design patterns in order to support game-based planning support tools, mostly for participatory and collaborative planning. Planners have been using game-based processes, and analog games seem to be the easier solution. We analyzed the top-ranking city-building games (CBGs) and games named after cities (GNACs) from Board Game Geek (BGG) and then ran a survey with BGG users (n = 102). The results show that GNACs do not deeply portray cities but tend to focus on a specific dimension. CBGs are better at mimicking an urban planning process but with many simplifications. Despite this, mastering the design of these two types of games is useful for planners who wish to use game-based planning processes. However, the engagement level might depend on the target audience.