Context

Contemporary spatial planning constitutes an interdisciplinary field which, by incorporating the principles of sustainable spatial development, aims at the organized management of transformations happening in space and are produced by human activities, as well as at the equilibrium between development opportunities and the impact that development has on space.
Cities and regions are continuously facing the challenges of sustainable spatial development, that is the need for an equilibrium among economic development, environmental protection, and social cohesion. At the same time, today there is urgent need for cities and regions to become more resilient to the results of various and often sudden changes, like climate change, lack of resources, and environmental, economic and social crises, in general, which are all phenomena with strong spatial dimensions and a direct imprint on the space of cities and regions.

Characteristic examples of such phenomena are natural disasters in cities and in the countryside, the particular challenges faced by mountainous, coastal and insular regions, the vulnerability of regions or parts of regions to wider economic changes, urban decay of cities or specific areas due to the economic crisis, the degradation of living conditions in cities due to worsening of the environmental and climatic conditions, the pressures on natural land because of urban expansion, the rise of greenhouse gases related to transportation and to the lack of integrated spatial and transport planning, the challenges for the integration of vulnerable social groups in urban space, etc.

Spatial planning arises as a very powerful tool for the evaluation and upgrading of the way cities, metropolitan areas, regions, as well as activities in urban and regional space are being designed or have been designed. In parallel, spatial planning is also a basic tool for avoiding the dangers through a network of preventive and regulatory interventions for the way that places are developed and functions in space materialize, as well as through strategic coordination for the integration of policies that impact space, by enabling the involvement and participation of interested parties and of citizens.