Combining physical, social, and economic elements, urban planning plays a critical role in creating sustainable, resilient, and livable urban environments. It encompasses the regulation of land use, infrastructure, transportation systems, and environmental resources, with a focus on sustainable urban design and green infrastructure. While progress has been made, there are still areas that have not been fully explored, including the integration of renewable energy sources and the development of urban environments that are resilient to environmental stresses. This study aims to analyze the direction and scope of urban planning research and to identify research gaps in this area. The method used is bibliometrics by analyzing data obtained from the Scopus database in January 2024. The results of this study showed that Yufeng Zhang, a professor at Wuhan University, China, was the most productive author in producing publications, namely 22 documents. In addition, the article produced by Qianqian Zhou is also influential in this research topic because it gets a number of citations, as high as 204 citations. Additionally, the results indicate the current focus of research on sustainability, adaptation to climate change, and technology in urban planning. These findings can guide future research, direct policy, and ensure an interdisciplinary approach to modern urban and regional challenges.

The Science and Technology Innovation Center holds a pivotal position in the national science and technology innovation system, and a scientific evaluation of the “Sci-tech Innovation Center” will guide its construction direction. This study found the advantages and disadvantages of the four cities through comparison; Hence improvement suggestions were proposed for the weaknesses of the four cities. There are two main paths for the government to drive technology innovation: STI (Science and Technology Innovation) mode and DUI (Doing, Using, Interacting) mode. With the aid of the evaluation index system of the Sci-tech Innovation Center, this article uses fuzzy sets, rough sets and fuzzy dynamic clustering methods to comprehensively evaluate the effects of driving technology innovation in the four cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. The results found that Shenzhen has a significant effect in DUI, and Beijing has a significant effect in STI. The choice of path is related to the abundance of innovation resources.

The discourse on advocacy planning involving actors has not explicitly addressed the question of who the actor advocate planner is and how an actor can become an advocate planner. This paper attempts to exploring the actor advocate planner in the context of Regional Splits as, employing social network analysis as a research tool. This research employs an exploratory, mixed-methods approach, predominantly qualitative in nature. The initial phase entailed the investigation and examination of qualitative data through the acquisition of information from interviews with key stakeholders involved in Regional Splits, including communities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governmental entities, and political parties. The subsequent phase utilized quantitative techniques derived from the findings of the qualitative analysis, which were then analysis into the Gephi application. The findings indicate that the Regional Splits the Presidium Community represents civil society and political parties serve as crucial advocate planners, facilitating connections between disparate actors and promoting Regional Splits through political parties.

Given the large amount of railway maintenance work in China, whereas the maintenance time window is continuously compressed, this paper proposes a novel network model-based maintenance planning and optimization method, transforming maintenance planning and optimization into an integer linear programming problem. Based on the dynamic inspection data of track geometry, the evaluation index of maintenance benefit and the model of the decay and recovery of the track geometry are constructed. The optimization objective is to maximize the railway network’s overall performance index, considering budget constraint, maximum length constraint, maximum number of maintenance activities within one single period constraint, and continuity constraint. Using this method, the track units are divided into several maintenance activities at one time. The combination of surrounding track units can be considered for each maintenance activity, and the specific location, measure, time, cost, and benefit can be determined. Finally, a 100 km high-speed railway network case study is conducted to verify the model’s effectiveness in complex optimization scenarios. The results show that this method can output an objective maintenance plan; the combination of unit track sections can be considered to expand the scope of maintenance, share the maintenance cost and improve efficiency; the spatial-temporal integrated maintenance planning and optimization can be achieved to obtain the optimal global solution.

City planning is becoming more and more crucial as modernization and urbanization progress quickly. Making maps is an essential and helpful way in the city planning process for gathering data about the layout of a city and its elements, including the roads, traffic, buildings, and environment. Thanks to advancements in technology, computer software is now used to create maps, yielding more accurate and varied results. As a result, cartography is now closely related to and plays a crucial part in city planning. This brief essay will discuss the value of cartography in urban development and planning, as well as the connection between the two.

The urban fringe – the zone lying between urban areas and the countryside, - offers valuable opportunities for commercial and residential development as well as for recreational activities, but it is often characterised by a number of land use problems and environmental conflicts. Within the UK, the urban fringe can be seen as a contested and dynamic space, yet for almost 70 years statutory town planning policies for the urban fringe have been largely concerned with containment designed to stop urban encroachment into the countryside. However, in 1970s a number of experimental urban fringe management projects were established around town and cities within the UK, culminating in the creation of the Groundwork projects, and here the focus was on a wider and more flexible approach, and more specifically on providing a range of opportunities for recreation, and to attempt to reconcile environmental conflicts. This paper explores the evolution of Groundwork, and more specifically focuses on two Research Questions namely, what was the initial rationale and aims of Groundwork? and secondly what is its current focus and future direction?