This paper describes various possibilities of the cities of futures considering various constraints and demand of society, environment and geography. The need for future cities arises because of the rapid growth in population and thereby causing a decline in the living standards. In the United States itself, many people are moving to cities every day. Today cities are getting crowded and if the influx continues at the same rate, current cities will become unmanageable and unlivable.

Almost all of the most populated cities in the world have invested heavily on high capacity urban public transit systems. Apart from the direct economic benefits –travel time reduction, environmental benefits, some indirect benefits are the increase in real estate values (residential and commercial), improved accessibility and possible land use changes towards the development of an area. This study investigates the impact of the future central metro stations of Thessaloniki on real estate values.

As a result of the growing impacts on global environments, it has become important for land use planners to extract, detect, monitor and predict land use/cover changes (LUCCs). The monitoring of LUCCs within a certain time period and predicting future trends of temporal and spatial changes are absolutely necessary. The aim of this research was to analyze and monitor LUCCs in Naghadeh County, Iran over a time span of 27 years and predict the future trend of changes during the period of 2014–2041.

The urban heat island effect is often associated with large metropolises. However, in the Netherlands even small cities will be affected by the phenomenon in the future (Hove et al., 2011), due to the dispersed or mosaic urbanisation patterns in particularly the southern part of the country: the province of North Brabant.

This paper proposes and defines new metropolitan governance strategies for territorial cohesion between inland and urban areas. Different reflections are here presented to comprehend how is it possible to implement cities’ ability to understand and manage metropolitan dynamics. In Europe, urbanisation and land abandonment is a widespread phenomenon compared to many other parts of the world. According to research carried out by the European Union it is estimated that four out of five European citizens will be living in urban areas abandoning villages and rural areas.

Open space (OS) is a key element in the provision of ecosystem services (ES) in urban environments. Under a land cover-land use perspective, cities are incorporating into the expansion process to different types of surfaces: sealed, paved surfaces and OS. The first corresponds to a land cover change while the second, which includes bare soil, grass, forest or any other type of non-sealed surface, corresponds to a land use change, without physical transformations. As a land use change OS is able to keep fundamental pre-existing ecological properties.

Urban transport plan according to the Italian national Law n.340/ 2000 have the specific aim of improving the traffic situation in the cities. Mobility plans consider all modes of transport planned towards a sustainable urban development. The measures implemented are a mixture of material and immaterial interventions with the aim to reach a better traffic environment with reduced traffic volumes and emissions, increased accessibility and safety and an increased quality of life for all citizens.

Monetary instruments to regulate parking are often used in central areas of cities to discourage long term parking of vehicles. The availability of parking facilities, and its cost, in fact represents an important element in the decision to operate private vehicles in urban areas. The availability of instruments and tools to check the outcome of modification in parking regulations, in terms of modification of car use, successfully support planners in the determination of the best policies to decrease congestion, and regulate the use of transportation in cities.

Land-use management and planning of cross-border regions is a complex problem. Different legislatures, development visions and interests on both sides of the border make it even more complicated. Introducing ecosystem services concept into land-use planning and management at cross-border regions is a challenge.  However not much is said about this issue in literature.

The Galapagos Islands are a unique sanctuary for wildlife and have gone through a fluctuating process of urbanization in the three main inhabited islands. Despite being colonized since the 1800s, it is during the last 25 years that a dramatic increase in population has been observed. Analyzing impervious surface change over this period in an ecologically fragile environment is a challenging task, thus two methods that have been widely employed in studying urban environments were compared in this study: sub-pixel using spectral mixture analyses (SMA) and object-based classification.