We are calling for articles to our new Collection on Sustainable cities and communities, in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goal: SDG 11. This collection creates a cross-disciplinary space for researchers and stakeholders working across various disciplines to address this significant global issue. We bring together scholarship and policy that makes a difference to the sustainability of cities and communities.

The aim of Goal 11 is to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The world’s population reached 8 billion in 2022 with over half living in urban areas. This figure is only expected to rise, with 70 per cent of people expected to live in cities by 2050. However many of these cities are not ready for this rapid urbanisation and urban sprawl, air pollution and limited open public spaces persist in cities. Sustainable development cannot be achieved without significantly transforming the way urban spaces are built and managed.

We are welcoming a range of perspectives including theoretical, methodological, quantitative and qualitative studies. Original Research and Review Papers are accepted. We are particularly interested in research that centers on the following topics:

By 2030, ensuring access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums Providing access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons

- The enhancement of inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries

- Strengthening efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage

- By 2030, a significant reduction in the number of deaths and the number of people affected and substantially decrease the direct economic losses relative to global gross domestic product caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with a focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations

- A reduction in the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, in particular air quality and waste management

- By 2030, the provision of universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities

- The support of positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning

- Substantially increasing the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and adaptation to climate change and resilience to disasters.

- The support of least developed countries, including through financial and technical assistance, in building sustainable and resilient buildings utilizing local materials

We are interested to hear your ideas for short commentary or a collection of articles, please contact the journal of your choice directly to discuss this before submitting.

Submission Procedure:

Submission is possible to one of the participating journals on the right, please select TC: SDG11 - Sustainable cities and communities in the electronic submission portal. Accepted articles will be published in the respective journal, as well as highlighted on the Collection page.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing society at a very fast pace affecting fundamental industries such as healthcare, education, law enforcement and social services. Central to this change is digital innovation that is reshaping traditional notions of trust, agency and institutional responsibility. Social intelligence is one of the significant aspects of this change with AI increasingly able to read human emotions, accommodate social context and act with context-aware behavior. This capability is giving rise to next-generation forms of human-machine interaction that render AI systems more intuitive and personalized. But as AI increasingly emulates human judgment and choice, ethical dilemmas become more sharply defined. Issues of fairness, transparency and bias in algorithmic systems are posing worldwide questions about how to regulate responsible AI. Increased dependence on AI also poses challenges of surveillance, privacy and consent, particularly in marginalized populations. The job displacement by automation further adds to these worries. Cultural, political and legal variation in areas creating universally acceptable norms for AI becomes a challenging affair. The only way out is through interdisciplinary cooperation to tackle this environment and achieve inclusive, accountable and ethical AI deployment.

The AI technology has grown from basic rule-based systems to sophisticated data-driven platforms. Initial models would function according to a pre-established rationale were minimally flexible and had no notion of context. Current Machine Learning and Neural Network based AI, on the contrary can adjust to advance situations by learning from large amounts of data. Transformer-based models such as BERT and GPT have empowered Natural Language Processing (NLP) breakthroughs, whereas affective computing and social signal processing make possible AI to read emotion and non-verbal signals. These advances have led to the rise of multimodal AI that combines text, audio, visual and sensor input to facilitate socially conscious decision-making. Emergent areas such as explainable AI (XAI), neurosymbolic reasoning and Federated Learning (FL) are coming into existence to confront issues of interpretability, ethics and data privacy. These set of technologies are also redefining the future of AI as they collaborate on not only how machines work but also how machines perform low-level interpretation in human-centered environments.

This special issue invites for interdisciplinary research, novel frameworks and ethical approaches that address the nexus of AI, digital transformation and social intelligence. Contributions are invited that examine the societal impact of AI, analyze ethical concerns such as bias, privacy and transparency and suggest remedies for accountable AI governance. It is invited to scholars, technologists and policymakers to submit research on socially responsible AI systems, state-of-the-art technologies such as transformers and FL and architectures that facilitate inclusive, accountable and human-centered AI deployment in all global contexts. The topic of interest for the blog includes, but is not limited to, the following,

List of topics for this special issue include, but not limited to the following:

- Federated Learning and Ethical Data Stewardship in Decentralized AI Ecosystems.

- The Role of Transformer Models in Shaping Emotionally Aware and Socially Responsible AI.

Privacy-Preserving AI: Differential Privacy as a Tool for Ethical Machine Learning.

Agent-Based Modeling for Ethical Simulation of Socio-Technical AI Systems.

Sentiment Mining and Bias Detection in Public Discourse Through Ethical NLP Practices.

Incorporating Value-Sensitive Design in AI for Democratic Societies. •

Algorithmic Fairness Auditing: A Framework for Evaluating Ethical Risks in AI Systems.

Natural Language Processing for Digital Ethics: Detecting Moral Dilemmas in Human-AI Dialogues.

Emotion-Aware Virtual Assistants and the Ethics of Empathy in Human-AI Interaction.

Digital Rights and Social Scoring: Ethics of AI Governance in Smart Societies.

Ethical Deployment of AI in Mental Health and the Challenges of Socially Intelligent Support Systems.

AI in Public Service Delivery and the Ethical Dilemmas of Algorithmic Decision-Making for Welfare Systems.

Trustworthy AI in Education and the Socio-Ethical Implications of AI-Enhanced Learning Environments.