About the Journal

Focus and Scope

URBANA is a biannual open-access peer-reviewed journal that aims to publish innovative and original papers on the processes and values of socio-spatial complexity of urban policies and practices.

The focus will be the Italian cities and territories, with a particular attention to its transformations within the metropolitan cities, inner territories, urban and social peripheries, and their flows of people, capitals, goods and ideas.

URBANA aims to prioritize reflection on the operationalization of public policies for cities: requirements, effectiveness, forms of governance and tools as enablers of policy-making innovation and change. The journal is set to investigate how cities work, who owns them, what is the influence of public policies on the dynamics of urban transformation, especially in the face of urban innovation and climate transition. URBANA aims to gather input and reflections on the capacity of cities to respond adaptively, innovatively, effectively to the challenges of urban policy and politics and the changing nature of a structural crisis, what resources need to be mobilized for a green, digital, climate transition for living environments, what lines of intervention (cultural, scientific, technical, political, operational) of policy making are to be implemented.

Through a series of call for papers and thematic sections, the journal provides a space of reflection on the ideas, the policies, the projects, the actors and the practices that continuously produce the city. The journal’s ambition is furthermore to constitute a platform for knowledge exchange bringing together academics from various disciplinary backgrounds, policy makers and practitioners.

Topics will include, but will not be limited to:

Urban regeneration and agency
City-making and urban commons
Climate change sustainable and crisis-resilient model
Economy and management of the city
Cities and social innovation
Preparedness and uncertainty for urban-social contexts
Urban Agenda and spatial-social reality
Enabling policies for urban, “green” and digital transition
the challenge of urban economies between old models and new possibilities

Section Policies

Editorial

This section includes invited essays and articles from the curators of the Volumes.

Keynote

Highlighting the most prominent and influential voices in the field, this section showcases invited keynote presentations.

Main Section

Includes 4-5 double-blind, peer-reviewed papers per issue, responding to a thematic call for paper. Article length, maximum 6000 words (40.000 characters) including footnotes and bibliography. Written in English.

Thematic Section

This section features curated content that aligns with a specific topic. Contributors are selected to provide insights, analyses, and perspectives related to the chosen theme, offering a focused exploration of relevant topics. It includes both peer-reviewed papers and invited essays.

Publication Frequency

URBANA is a biannual journal.

Peer Review Process

URBANA releases two thematic call for papers a year.

Submitted papers will be first assessed for quality and suitability by the URBANA Editorial Team. Papers will be submitted for plagiarism detection through iThenticate. Once evaluated, papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed by independent, anonymous expert referees.

This means that the reviewers and the authors don’t know each other’s identity. To facilitate this, the authors need to ensure that manuscripts submitted on the URBANA platform are anonymized. Reviewers are chosen on the base of their expertise and knowledge on the selected paper topics.

Open access policy

The Journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

It releases its articles under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This license allows anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy the contributions. The works must be properly attributed to its author(s). It is not necessary to ask further permissions both to author(s) or journal board, although you are kindly requested to inform the Journal for every reuse of the papers.

Authors who publish in this Journal maintain the copyrights.

Authors are welcome to post the final draft post-refereeing (postprint) on a personal website, a collaborative wiki, departmental website, social media websites, institutional repository or non-commercial subject-based repositories.

Publication Fees

The journal has neither article processing charges nor submission processing fees.

Ethics

URBANA adopts the AlmaDL Journals Code of Ethics.

The code is inspired by the guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), in particular to the COPE Core Practices and its Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

All parties involved in the editorial process, editorial staff members, authors, reviewers must know and apply the ethical principles of that document.

Data Policy

Authors are encouraged to follow Open Science and FAIR principles by publishing the research data associated to their articles in trusted data repositories, according to the international best practices and data management guidelines.

Detailed information is reported in the AlmaDL Journals Data Policy.

Authors who are affiliated to the University of Bologna can publish their data in AMSActa, the institutional research data repository.

Indexing and abstracting

The Journal is indexed in the following databases and search engines:

ACNP – Italian Catalogue of Serials
BASE – Bielefield Academic Search Engine
Google Scholar – Academic search engine
ROAD – Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources
Ulrich’s – Global Serials Directory
Worldcat – The world’s largest library catalog

Archiving Policy

As part of AlmaDL Journals, the Journal adopts a strategy to ensure long term preservation of the published content. Please see the archiving policy of the publishing service AlmaDL Journals.

Publishers

Department of Architecture
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

Viale del Risorgimento, 2
40136 – Bologna (Italy)

Urban@it