Editorial introduction

Community Planning

Abstract

The term “community planning” appears in various disciplines. Perhaps, there is no universal definition that would be accepted by all scholars given the broad meaning of “community”, the changing players and the evolving approaches of urban planning. “Community” usually refers to people, place and the ties between people in those places. Planning was once the actions of governments for the common well-being of a place. However, in recent decades, a movement of citizen/NGO participation has deepened the practice. According to research that analyzed a total of 1,681 articles with the keyword “community planning” published from 1999 to 2014 in the fields of “Planning Development”, “Geography” and “Urban Studies” in Web of Science databases, the most discussed themes were “collaboration and participation”, “physical planning at the community level”, “special community” (such as gated communities), “safety”, “emotion and identity” (such as the feeling of belonging), “sustainable development”, “revitalization”, and “application of GIS” (Yuan, Liu, & Lin, 2015). In this sense, all the seven articles included in this special issue well fit the meaning of “community planning”.