According to the data released by the World Health Organization (WHO), the proportion of the world's population aged over 60 is projected to rise from 12% to 22% between 2015 and 2050, with more than 1 billion people having some form of disability worldwide. Among them, nearly 200 million suffer from severe functional difficulties. The aging society and a global increase in chronic diseases are two major challenges facing all countries. Also, it is a universal trend to experience fast urban renewal and land use change.

Against this backdrop, some relevant concepts have emerged, such as universal design, inclusive design and accessible design, whose focus is to improve the applicability of design to special user groups (mainly the elderly and the disabled), link the creation of aging-friendly environment and expand from the target user group to a wider mainstream and sound users. These concepts exert influence on the urban, architectural and environmental design and planning. For the efficient, equate, inclusive, sustainable and healthy use of urban space, it is crucial to understand how multi-scale universal spatial design can be integrated into the practice of urban renewal. The full use of these urban spaces is inseparable from a variety of new spatial research methodologies such as big data, smart operation systems and machine learning. In this special issue, a multi-scale, cross-city exploration is conducted to reveal how universal spatial planning and design can be integrated into refined urban renewal.

This special issue covers the following topics: 

1. The methodologies or operatingsystems of digital (or big data) research, and an investigation into how these digital technologies can be applied to the planning of travel paths and core activity venues for different groups of people;
2. The evaluation ofspatial distribution and functional integration of universal design infrastructure, landscape, and buildings for urban renewal, the exploration of whether their distribution can promote social interaction, the justice and health of the society, and the research on how the community life cycle planning contributes to the universal (or accessible or inclusive) design;
3. The universal (or accessibleor inclusive) design of spaces and environment for urban renewal, especially environmental-behavior, human factor and ergonomics studies;
4. The similarity and difference in universalplanning and design regarding the renewal of old and new neighborhoods;
5. An exploration of how to integratevarious social resources and collaborative management measures for the pre-programming of the multi-scale universal planning and design in the course of urban renewal;
6. The inter-generational integrationin the environmental universal design;

Other related topics.