A deeper knowledge of project processes, supported by advanced modelling tools and algorithmic methods, improves project estimation in two main directions: on the one hand, it enables the mitigation of risks related to cost and time deviations; on the other, it opens opportunities for design optimization aimed at cost reduction through parametric and computational analyses.

Developing these strategies is crucial to support all actors involved in transformation processes, particularly in marginalised contexts where reducing inequalities is a priority. This session aims to explore these research perspectives, with particular attention to:

• Cost and design optimization supported by BIM models;
• State-of-the-art models for predicting cost overruns and schedule delays;
• The use of digital twins to enable dynamic cost and time simulations throughout the project lifecycle;
• Machine learning techniques and neural networks for economic and non-economic evaluations;
• Adaptive, parametric, and algorithmic design models;
• The assessment of data governance and dataset quality in predictive modelling;
• The role of optimization algorithms in multi-criteria decision-making;
• Risk management frameworks and risk mitigation strategies.

The rapid evolution of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is profoundly reshaping the field of remote sensing, providing new and powerful capabilities for data acquisition, processing, and interpretation across multiple spatial and temporal scales. All these processes are increasingly managed within advanced GIS environments, which enable the integration, visualization and analysis of heterogeneous geospatial datasets in a coherent and decision-oriented framework.

This thematic session aims to explore innovative methodologies and applications that exploit the full potential of GIS environment and of multispectral, hyperspectral, LiDAR and SAR data, emphasizing their combination with state-of-the-art computational techniques. Particular attention will be devoted to:

• Machine learning, deep learning, cloud-based processing and multi-sensor data fusion;
• Environmental and cultural heritage monitoring (vegetation dynamics, water and soil assessment);
• Climate-related impacts and the preservation of cultural assets;
• Land-management strategies and land-use/land-cover change detection;
• Natural hazard assessment (wildfire monitoring, flood mapping, ground-deformation analysis);
• Precision agriculture and urban analytics;
• Integration of GIS-based remote sensing products into decision-support systems.

Some crucial issues for the era in which we live, such as digital transformation and artificial intelligence, the climate crisis and related energy policies, social and economic inequalities, and issues related to health and well-being, require new reflections. These include focusing on urbanization models to be implemented and, consequently, on the city of the future, which is now upon us.

These issues are closely interlinked and require integrated, multi-stakeholder, and multidimensional approaches. Above all, they require a shift from forecasting to foresight approaches. Instead of thinking about the future by looking at the past and its trends, we must work on the new, the unknown, and the active experimentation of strategic forecasts with long-term visions.

Based on the above, the session aims to gather contributions from researchers and academics who address the planning and design of the “city of tomorrow” by identifying tools and methodologies to examine the challenges and opportunities that the future may hold.

The ecological, digital, and socio-cultural transitions currently unfolding are profoundly transforming the conceptualisation, organisation, and governance of European and Mediterranean territories and tourism destinations. In a macro-region marked by climate change, demographic transformations, and pressures on heritage, the need emerges for more collaborative, inclusive, and multi-level governance models.

The session welcomes contributions that critically investigate how networks, markets, and people shape contemporary territorial planning, highlighting:

• Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) and new models of integrated governance;
• Tools and approaches for participatory, collaborative, and adaptive planning;
• Territorial policies and complex decision-making scenarios from a multiscalar perspective;
• Territorial regeneration processes based on culture, creativity, tourism, and sport;
• Destination management strategies in peripheral, rural, or peri-urban areas;
• Digital innovation (platforms, big data, extended reality) in destination governance;
• New geographies of tourist mobilities and their impact on tourism planning;
• Narrative, heritage, and place branding as tools for coordination and participation.

This session draws on Actor-Network theory and examines how digital humanities provide new lenses for understanding the interplay of actors, networks and mediating forces across diverse heritage contexts. It explores how relations shaped by historical trade systems, colonial legacies and contemporary mobilities across Europe and beyond can be reframed within the current common-heritage discourse.

Through digital mapping, archival reconstruction, data-driven interpretation and narrative modelling, it investigates how multiscalar settlements (from port cities to villages) negotiate their multicultural pasts and futures. The session welcomes contributions that:

• Examine urban changes through postcolonial lenses and digital technologies;
• Study trade routes and intercultural exchange;
• Analyze community-led practices or local stakeholder engagement within multicultural settlement systems;
• Explore how tangible and intangible heritage shape collective identities when mediated through digital platforms.

The environmental, digital, demographic, and social transitions require a profound review of territorial strategies for sustainable, equitable, and inclusive development. Regenerating cities and territories means rebalancing resources and relationships through cooperation between institutions, businesses, academia, civil society, and the environment, promoting local resilience and enhancing marginalized areas as laboratories for innovation.

The session explores inclusive regeneration as an evolutionary paradigm of the Leave No Place Behind principle, in line with the 2030 Agenda, the European Green Deal, and cohesion policies. Particular attention is paid to three strategic axes of integrated territorial transition:

• Urban and territorial regeneration;
• Sustainable tourism;
• Social innovation.

The session invites theoretical and applied contributions that explore collaborative and polycentric governance models capable of transforming fragility into a resource.

This thematic session encourages the proposal of valuation frameworks to support Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in urban and peri-urban contexts through integrated and multidimensional assessment perspectives. Contributions are invited to address the wide panel of values and effects generated by NBS, encompassing monetary values (e.g., avoided costs, market and non-market valuation) as well as non-monetary and qualitative dimensions, including ecological performance (Ecosystem Services), social equity, cultural benefits, and governance impacts.

Attention will also be given to methodological frameworks able to capture different stakeholders’ perspectives. Relevant topics include:

• Tools for assessing ecosystem services through monetary and biophysical perspectives;
• Mixed-method valuation frameworks and multicriteria analysis;
• Representation of trade-offs and co-benefits;
• Monetary and non-monetary evaluation models;
• Stakeholders analysis;
• Context-based evaluation supporting planning and policy decisions.

Both empirical studies and real-world applications are encouraged to underline the strategic role of evaluation in supporting decision-making related to NBS implementation.

This special issue seeks to examine industrial heritage not as a static relic of the past, but as a dynamic terrain of agency, infrastructure, value and contested meaning. While traditional scholarship has often framed industrial heritage in terms of conservation, tourism or architectural typology, this issue shifts the lens to broader processes of reuse, governance, digital mediation, ecological crisis and community agency.

We invite contributions that explore how industrial sites, infrastructures, machines and landscapes are being re-imagined, re-scaled, repurposed or contested. Suggested topics include:

• Adaptive reuse of industrial infrastructure and its role in community empowerment and spatial justice.
• Digital heritage tools (3D/digital twins, IoT, XR) applied to industrial heritage sites and their implications.
• The politics of scale and value in industrial heritage: local vs regional vs global; heritage as commodity vs heritage as commons.
• Industrial landscapes in ecological transition (e.g., extraction, aquifers, water systems) and resource justice.
• Heritage, migration and labor histories: whose industrial past is preserved or erased?
• Institutional regimes of industrial heritage, redevelopment policy, and politics of change.

Human movement has been a constant thread in our history, shaping how communities emerge, shift, and take form over time. Today, conflicts, social and economic inequalities, and environmental disruption drive large waves of displacement. These forces intersect with demographic decline, housing shortages, and widening territorial gaps. Cities, which attract the majority of newcomers, serve as both places of encounter and landscapes where inequalities in access to housing, services, and opportunities become especially visible.

In this complex scenario, architecture and planning take on a vital role in promoting spatial fairness and social inclusion. People who migrate bring more than their belongings. They carry building skills, spatial habits, and cultural ways of imagining space that can enrich local practices and everyday life.

Viewing migration as a layered and multifaceted form of movement encourages new ways of thinking about how settlements evolve. It points to adaptable environments that draw strength from cultural diversity and that respond to change rather than resist it. This perspective aligns with the Symposium’s focus on ecological transition, digital transformation, and social cohesion.

This session examines how ecological engineering principles can be integrated into urban and regional planning to address the accelerating challenges of climate change, energy transition, and environmental degradation. It explores how nature-based solutions and technologically adaptive design approaches can redefine urban sustainability amid rapid growth and increasing socio-ecological vulnerability.

Participants are invited to share research that demonstrates how ecological engineering can enhance climate-responsive urban design. Key themes include:

• Green and blue infrastructures;
• Passive heating and cooling systems;
• Ecosystem services that mitigate urban heat and improve resource efficiency;
• Development of resilient, low-carbon, and inclusive cities aligned with the European Green Deal.

This session explores the concept of Design for All as a strategic approach to achieving spatial justice and social inclusion in the built environment. It aims to integrate accessibility principles within architectural and urban design practices to ensure that spaces, buildings, and cities are usable and enjoyable by all individuals. Additionally, the session addresses the next generation of inclusive design by examining how digital technologies and human-centered approaches are reshaping accessibility.

• To enhance academic and professional awareness of the role of inclusive design in creating equitable and resilient urban environments;
• To discuss cutting-edge research and technologies in accessibility, assistive design, and inclusive smart cities;
• To exchange experiences and case studies on integrating accessibility standards in architectural and urban design;
• To develop assessment frameworks and policy recommendations that promote inclusive and sustainable design practices;
• To envision future inclusive environments in the context of digital transformation, social equity, and climate change.

The session aims to investigate, with reference to the inner areas of southern Europe and the Mediterranean countries, those formal and informal experiments that define new integrated systems of natural, social, economic, and cultural resources. These support – through spatial justice, urban regeneration, and landscape care – the improvement of the living conditions of local communities and external attractiveness.

Attention is focused on the phenomenon of self-generation of physical and virtual spaces for collective use, which represent the scene within which communities of people generate new urban legacies. The aim is to identify those actions, defined by institutional plans and programs but also stimulated by spontaneous processes, which recognize a new interpretation of proximity in relation to original hill and mountain systems and new forms of land use, favored by the digital transition.

The ultimate goal of the session is to compare effective urban and territorial governance policies and experiences with a view to supporting and establishing new legacies for old and new communities.

This session addresses the structural paradox characterizing inner peripheries and left-behind territories: a vast stock of vacant, obsolete, and underused housing heritage that remains largely inaccessible. Rather than a simple market failure, this “housing crisis in reverse” is rooted in structural barriers: property fragmentation, poor building conditions, lack of accessibility, owner distrust, real estate speculation, and the impacts of touristification.

We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that explore three interconnected axes of innovation:

• New models of housing and ownership: Exploration of alternatives such as Community Land Trusts, community cooperatives, and co-housing.
• Social infrastructures and mediation: The role of services, workspaces, and culture-based innovation as foundational support for new dwelling practices.
• Planning, governance and financial toolkits: Development of legal and financial mechanisms (e.g., social impact finance, community funds) for heritage reactivation.

This thematic session explores how socio-technical systems and human sense-making processes interrelate with key ecological conditions in an era defined by climate disruption, sustainability imperatives, and infrastructural fragility. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the session invites scholars from organizational studies, cognitive science, and related fields to reflect on how environmental dynamics shape, and are shaped by, the cognitive and organizational capacities of human collectives.

The session aims to address pressing questions, such as: How do organizational structures and technologies shape collective and individual cognition in relation to environmental challenges? What forms of coordination and knowledge production practices emerge in response to ecological uncertainty, and how do they redistribute expertise and agency?

Across urban planning, landscape, architecture, urban economics, geography and resilience science, NbS are now framed as actions that protect, restore, or manage natural/modified ecosystems to address societal challenges while delivering biodiversity and human well-being benefits.

This session calls for contributions mainly tackling on implementing, upscaling and mainstreaming of NBS from the aspects of:

• Shared Governance and urban living labs: NBS as input for the experimentation of shared governance in territorial plans.
• Planning NBS from a justice perspective: Ensuring NBS do not generate or reinforce existing inequalities.
• New Typologies and Taxonomies: Integrating principles of social justice to ensure equitable access to ecological benefits.
• NBS in post-implementation analysis: Addressing gaps in ongoing management, maintenance, monitoring, and evaluation.
• Economic Evaluation and Performance Analysis: Cost-benefit analysis, ecosystem-service valuation, and natural capital accounting.
• Territorial Co-Management: Combining ecological regeneration, spatial justice, and heritage valorization.

This session explores the evolving condition of peripheries conceived as places shaped by the relationships that human communities develop over time with their territorial context. The discussion focuses on how processes of cultural heritage enhancement, socioecological resilience building, and community-based governance contribute to redefining the role and identity of peripheral territories.

This session explores how Machine Learning (ML), Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, and other computational techniques are advancing innovation, sustainability, and digital transformation. It welcomes multidisciplinary approaches combining AI with applications in tourism, environment, energy, health, governance, and manufacturing.

Rising urbanization has increased challenges on economic development in rural and peripheral regions. This session contributes with knowledge around place development through the cultural and creative economy, focusing on European regions with peripheral, economic, and demographic challenges.

This session addresses several aspects of Global Ecological Transition, ranging from new expansion to the enhancement of existing settlements, and from retrofitting to reforestation. It aligns with EU public policy strategies such as the Green Deal and PNIEC 2023.

The related value concepts and quantitative and qualitative valuation models include:

• Eco-system services;
• Recovery policies and incentives;
• Social and economic innovation;
• Environmental impacts and building eco-retrofitting;
• Ecological and cultural resources.

The public-private partnership (PPP) is a vital mechanism for addressing infrastructure gaps and fostering economic growth. This session will focus on analyzing strategies and best practices to foster effective collaborations between the public and private sectors, exploring new contractual frameworks, risk management approaches, and project financing.

Topics will include:

• Special public-private partnerships (PPPs);
• Private-driven regeneration;
• Management of used and unused infrastructure;
• PSPP for the valorization of cultural heritage.

The most recent version of Italy’s National Strategy for Inner Areas (PSNAI) highlights demographic crisis as the key driver of socio-economic marginality. Large parts of the Italian territory—especially in the south and islands—are at risk of poverty. This perspective is highly critical and must be tested against the resilience of these territories.

Our session aims to provide a platform for discussion on small-scale, locally driven development strategies—particularly those based on heritage and tourism—that marginal areas have implemented to resist decline.

The aim of this session is to promote an interdisciplinary perspective on the resilience of territories, infrastructures, and organizations to multiple hazards, including seismic, climatic, and systemic risks. The session welcomes contributions exploring how engineering, risk management, and organizational sciences can converge to support integrated approaches to safety and sustainability.

The transformation of the built environment driven by the energy transition poses economic, organisational and market challenges. This thematic session explores international and national perspectives on sustainable business models, value creation in efficient real estate, and innovation in construction processes, highlighting the need for strategies that align environmental objectives with economic viability.

In a context marked by climate change, ecological degradation, and socio-economic inequalities, this track examines the critical intersections between planning, governance, and property market studies. It invites contributions that analyse how planners, public institutions, private developers, and financial actors interact within increasingly complex land and property markets.

Across Europe, the housing crisis has reconfigured the role of local governments. This session invites contributions examining how municipalities are developing new instruments—such as rent regulation, short-term rental management, and cooperative schemes—to address residential pressures while advancing social justice. We welcome case studies from small and medium-sized cities to discuss if these transformations represent a broader reconfiguration of housing policies.

The session explores how sustainability assessment frameworks and emerging digital technologies (IoT, Digital Twin, AI) can accelerate the transition toward a more efficient and resilient built environment. It discusses how data-driven processes can optimize mitigation strategies across the building’s life cycle and how digital solutions allow for more user-oriented design.

The recovery and structural retrofitting of existing buildings and bridges is a complex challenge, especially under the pressures of climate change. This special session explores monitoring techniques, experimental research, and design strategies that ensure durable and resilient interventions aligned with current environmental challenges, with a specific focus on conserving and extending the lifespan of structural materials.

Built heritage is a key resource for sustainable territorial development. The Session aims to trigger an interdisciplinary debate on the contemporary challenges of leveraging heritage’s multiple potentials, reflecting on heritage conservation’s space in the planning agenda and the role of evaluation approaches.

As housing is increasingly viewed as a financial asset rather than a place for living, this session explores the implications for design quality and urban equity. We invite contributions examining the impacts of financialized housing models and projects demonstrating equitable, community-driven alternatives.

Inner areas are often labelled as lagging-behind but show emerging signals of resilience. This session aims to investigate the specific features and dynamics of the territorial economies of inner areas, focusing on both their vulnerabilities and their adaptive capacities. Particular attention will be devoted to the underexplored determinants of regional economic resilience, such as place branding, social innovation, and artificial intelligence.

Black or Dark Tourism encompasses the presentation and consumption of death and disaster sites. Often, this trivializes historical complexities. The aim of this session is to create a critical space for discussion between "difficult heritage" and tourist enjoyment, exploring how conservation practices and tourism can mutually influence one another.

Overtourism reshapes the social tissue and living conditions of cities. This workshop examines the relationship between tourism pressure and community well-being. The objective is to define approaches for resilient city management strategies capable of reconciling competitiveness, tourist attractiveness and life quality.

The intertwined crises of climate change and inequality call for a radical rethinking of urban planning decision-making. This session explores how decision-support methodologies (such as MCDA and Problem Structuring Methods) contribute to urban design, considering the growing influence of digital tools and Artificial Intelligence.

This session explores how place-based governance and strategic planning can foster sustainable local development, moving beyond tourism dependency. Focusing on community resilience and social innovation, it discusses alternative models for regenerating small towns and inner areas undergoing transitions.

In recent years, the relationship between tourism and territorial development has become a key arena for rethinking how places are valued, governed, and transformed. Beyond its economic dimension, tourism mobilizes cultural, social, and environmental resources, shaping new forms of spatial organization and collective identity. The value of place notion highlights how tourism can both enhance and contest the meanings and functions attributed to territories, reflecting the tensions between global markets, local agency, and sustainability goals.

This session invites contributions that critically examine the intersection between tourism, economic values, place-making, and territorial strategies. We encourage theoretical, empirical, and comparative studies exploring how tourism policies and practices influence the governance, planning, and evaluation of territories at multiple scales—from cities to rural, coastal, or mountain areas. Particular attention is given to approaches that integrate diverse dimensions of territorial value: ecological limits and landscape protection, community engagement and participatory governance, and innovation in policy design and evaluation.

We welcome contributions addressing, among others:

           
• Tourism as a tool for sustainable and inclusive territorial development;
           
• The articulation between tourism, heritage, and spatial justice;
           
• Policy evaluation and strategic planning for tourism-led regeneration;
           
• Economic evaluation of plans, programs and projects for the enhancement of tourism in the territories;
           
• Conflicts and synergies between tourism and other land uses;
           
• Comparative governance models and multi-scalar planning frameworks.
       

By bridging analytical and operational perspectives, the session aims to foster a dialogue among geographers, economists, planners, and policy scholars interested in how tourism contributes to redefining the value, governance, and futures of places.