Digital Urban Regeneration and Its Impact on Urban Renewal Processes and Development

Abstract

Urban renewal is one of the main motivations of city regeneration. Urban renewal strategies mainly relate to demolishing old buildings and redeveloping new buildings instead, improving buildings and deteriorated areas, infilling new buildings within existing urban fabric, integrating new communities into old and rolling-down areas, and so on. In parallel to this situation, the modern world is in the wake of the 4th Industrial Revolution, which is characterized by a merger of physical and digital spaces and is consequently affecting cities and their quality of life. Therefore, urban regeneration must take into consideration these digital innovations and harness the emerging technological changes into new development of urban renewal processes and decision-making approaches. This editorial introduces the topic of digital urban regeneration, by discussing possible methodologies and decision-making approaches and presents the thematic issue on “embedding digital technologies into urban renewal processes and development.”