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.

Quality control, publication ethics and publication malpractice

The following statement is inspired by COPE Code of Conduct:
http://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors.pdf

Duties for the Editorial Team

The Editorial Team takes all reasonable steps to ensure the quality of the material published in URBANA. Editorial Team has a duty to act if they suspect misconduct or if an allegation of misconduct is brought to it. This duty extends to both published and unpublished papers.

The decision of the Editorial Team and of the International Scientific Committee as to accept or reject a paper for publication in the Journal is based on subject relevance and originality and is guided by the review of suitably qualified reviewers.

The Editorial Team will ensure that appropriate reviewers are selected for submissions.

The Editorial Team strives to ensure that the journal's peer review is fair, unbiased and timely.

The Editorial Team is ready to justify any important deviation from the described peer-reviewed process.

The Editorial Team and the International Scientific Committee evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content regardless to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin or citizenship of the authors.

The Editorial Team’s decision may be constrained by the legal requirements regarding hate speech, libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The Editorial Team provides guidance to authors that encourage accuracy, completeness and clarity of research reporting, including technical editing and the use of appropriate guidelines and checklists.

The Editorial Team ensures that the material submitted to the Journal remains confidential while under review. Confidentiality of individual information obtained in the course of research or professional interactions is guaranteed.

Duties for Authors

Authors are responsible for the articles they submit: they must assure the originality of their works, being aware of the consequences of misconduct.

Authors should always acknowledge their sources and provide relevant citation details for all publications that have influenced their work.

Authors are asked to provide the raw data in connection with a paper for editorial review, and should be prepared to retain such data for a reasonable time after publication in order to provide access to such data.

For images, documents or any other annex protected by copyright, authors will be responsible for granting publishing permission from the respective copyright holders before publication.

Authors are asked to follow the Author’s Guidelines published by the Journal, therefore ensuring accuracy, completeness and clarity of research reporting, including technical editing.

Duties for Reviewers

Reviewers are provided with a guidance on everything that is to be expected from them, including the need to handle submitted material in confidence.

Reviewers are required to disclose any potential competing interests before agreeing to review a submission.

Reviewers are encouraged to comment on the originality of submissions and to be alert to redundant publications and plagiarism. They will alert the Editorial Team regarding intellectual property issues and plagiarism and work to handle potential breaches of intellectual property laws and conventions.

Reviewers should help identifying relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.

Handling of errors and misconducts

Editors will promptly act in case of errors and misconducts, both proven and alleged. In case such as errors in articles or in the publication process, fraudulent publication or plagiarism, appropriate steps will be taken, following the recommendations, guidelines and checklists from COPE. This includes the publication of an erratum (errors from the publication process), corrigendum (errors from the author(s)) or, in the most severe cases, the retraction of the affected work.

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.

Archiving Policy

The University of Bologna has an archival arrangement with the National Central Libraries of Florence and Rome within the national project Magazzini Digitali.
http://www.depositolegale.it/editori-aderenti/

Publishers

Department of Architecture
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

Viale del Risorgimento, 2 40136 – Bologna (Italy)

Urban@it

Viale del Risorgimento, 2
40136 – Bologna (Italy)