We are now entering the third decade of the 21st Century, and, especially in recent years, the achievements made by researchers and professionals have been exceptional, leading to major advancements in the fast-growing field of the Built Environment.Frontiers has organised a series of Research Topics to highlight the latest advancements in research across the field of Built Environment with articles from the members of our accomplished Editorial Boards.

Dear readers of Frontiers in Built Environment, As the Field Chief Editor for Frontiers in Built Environment, I am happy to present this curated selection of papers that have made a significant impact within our community. Among the large number of submissions that we received, these 14 papers represent some of the best published in 2023, the year when the journal attained its first impact factor. With many high-quality papers to consider, in selecting these 14 articles we faced the challenging task of how to include papers from across the 15 distinct sections of the journal whilst at the same time achieving a sense of cohesion to the ebook overall. However, amidst this diversity, we noticed a convergence in our highest-quality papers around three pivotal themes that are central to our journal’s mission: resilience, sustainability, and technology. In this way, despite the broad range of topics covered within both our journal and this selection, this ebook can truly be considered representative of our journal as a whole. These carefully chosen papers encompass high-quality original research and comprehensive reviews, which also embody the ethos of innovation and excellence that defines our journal. As the Field Chief Editor, I am thankful to all authors who have enriched our journal with their high-caliber work. I extend sincere appreciation to the dedicated efforts of our editors and reviewers, whose invaluable contributions have been instrumental in shaping Frontiers in Built Environment in 2023.

How do we accommodate a growing urban population in a way that is sustainable, equitable, and inviting? This question is becoming increasingly urgent to answer as we face diminishing fossil-fuel resources and the effects of a changing climate while global cities continue to compete to be the most vibrant centers of culture, knowledge, and finance. Jan Gehl has been examining this question since the 1960s, when few urban designers or planners were thinking about designing cities for people. But given the unpredictable, complex and ephemeral nature of life in cities, how can we best design public infrastructure—vital to cities for getting from place to place, or staying in place—for human use? Studying city life and understanding the factors that encourage or discourage use is the key to designing inviting public space. In How to Study Public Life Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre draw from their combined experience of over 50 years to provide a history of public-life study as well as methods and tools necessary to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. This type of systematic study began in earnest in the 1960s, when several researchers and journalists on different continents criticized urban planning for having forgotten life in the city. City life studies provide knowledge about human behavior in the built environment in an attempt to put it on an equal footing with knowledge about urban elements such as buildings and transport systems. Studies can be used as input in the decision-making process, as part of overall planning, or in designing individual projects such as streets, squares or parks. The original goal is still the goal today: to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. Anyone interested in improving city life will find inspiration, tools, and examples in this invaluable guide.

Social housing has been a forefront research topic especially from its economic and socio-cultural factors. The nature of social housing in the Arabian Gulf Countries has been distinctive in its approach with usually generous areas and urban sprawl designs. Recently, most of these Arabian Gulf Countries have gone through profound transformation in their social and housing paradigms influenced by their sustainability adopted agendas. Still, scholarly documentation and analysis of the processes and products of these transformed paradigms are largely missing, or at least fragmented. So, there is a desperate need to boost research work in this field as related to each city/country in this region, with largely expected mutual effects that these experiences might have on each other and on the global debate about sustainable and resilient social housing as a whole.

In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany's many growing cities. Germany's Urban Frontiers is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community, and nature shaped the changing spaces of German urban peripheries as the walls and boundaries that had so long defined central European cities disappeared. Through a series of local case studies including Leipzig, Oldenburg, and Berlin, Kristin Poling reveals how Germans on the edge of the city confronted not only questions of planning and control, but also their own histories and futures as a community.

Sustainable design requires that design practitioners respond to a particular set of social, cultural and environmental conditions. 'Vernacular Architecture and Regional Design' defines a set of strategies for understanding the complexities of a regional setting. Through a series of international case studies, it examines how architects and designers have applied a variety of tactics to achieve culturally and environmentally appropriate design solutions. • Shows that architecture and design are inextricably linked to social and environmental processes, and are not just technical or aesthetic exercises. • Articulates a variety of methods to realise goals of socially responsible and environmentally responsive design. • Calls for a principled approach to design in an effort to preserve fragile environments and forge sustainable best practice. 'Vernacular Architecture and Regional Design' will appeal to educators and professional practitioners in the fields of architecture, heritage conservation and urban design. Dr. Kingston Wm. Heath is Professor and Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Oregon. Previously he was Professor of Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte where he taught seminars on vernacular architecture and regional design theory. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and Brown University. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals, he is the author of Patina of Place, and winner of the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award from The Vernacular Architecture Forum for excellence in a scholarly work. He has earned an international reputation in the field of vernacular architecture and has directed field schools in Italy and Croatia.