The built environment faces overlapping challenges: accelerating urbanization, material resource limits, climate risk, and changing socio-economic needs. Addressing these demands requires rigorous scholarship combined with applied spatial problem-solving. The SCI Journal of Architecture, Planning and Urban Design (SJAPUD) serves as an academic venue dedicated to addressing these intersections.
Published under SciMatic, SJAPUD focuses on sustainable, human-centered approaches to shaping cities, settlements, and interior spaces. This guide details the journal's research scope, the types of contributions it considers, and the academic profiles of authors best suited to submit their work.
Thematic Scope of the Journal
SJAPUD covers the full lifecycle and multi-scale dimensions of the built environment, spanning structural units, individual buildings, neighborhoods, and metropolitan systems. The journal organizes its scope around three primary pillars: spatial design, urban and regional systems, and technical performance.
1. Architectural and Spatial Design
Submissions in this area examine design methodologies, spatial theory, and cultural dimensions of space. Key topics include:
- Architectural design theory and practice: Critical analyses of contemporary practices, spatial typologies, and formal exploration.
- Interior design and spatial planning: Studies addressing indoor environmental quality, behavioral spatial layout, ergonomic strategies, and functional programmatic reuse.
- Heritage conservation and adaptive reuse: Methods for assessing, preserving, retrofitting, and repurposing historic structures and urban heritage fabric.
- Parametric design and digital fabrication: Computational workflows, algorithmic modeling, generative design, and additive or automated manufacturing in construction.
2. Urban Systems, Planning, and Policy
This stream addresses the systemic frameworks that govern settlement patterns, land use, and resource allocation. Topics include:
- Urban planning and regional development: Strategic master planning, zoning methodologies, spatial equity, and decentralization policies.
- Housing policy and affordable design: Socio-spatial analyses of housing supply, informal settlements, community-led housing models, and cost-effective construction strategies.
- Transportation planning and urban mobility: Transit-oriented development, active transport infrastructure, last-mile logistics, and multimodal network integration.
- Smart city technologies and infrastructure: Sensor deployment, urban data analytics, digital twins, and municipal service automation.
3. Environmental Performance and Building Technology
Research under this pillar focuses on empirical performance, ecological footprint, and climate resilience:
- Sustainable and green architecture: Passive design strategies, net-zero energy design, lifecycle assessment (LCA), and circular material choices.
- Climate-responsive and resilient design: Urban heat island mitigation, flood-resilient spatial layouts, passive cooling techniques, and disaster-preparedness planning.
- Building technology and construction management: Structural engineering advances, site operations, lean construction, quality management, and building information modeling (BIM).
- Landscape architecture and environmental design: Urban ecology, green infrastructure, biophilic design, and public open-space planning.
Accepted Manuscript Formats
Recognizing that architecture and planning produce distinct forms of knowledge, SJAPUD accepts multiple manuscript formats:
- Original Research Articles: Comprehensive papers presenting empirical, computational, or theoretical research with clear methodologies and verified conclusions.
- Review Papers: Critical, systematic syntheses of existing literature that identify gaps, evaluate methodologies, and map future research trajectories within a given subfield.
- Design Case Studies: Structured analyses of implemented designs or planning schemes that evaluate performance, execution challenges, and programmatic outcomes against established benchmarks.
- Project Reports: Concise documentation of innovative planning interventions, field pilot studies, or experimental constructions emphasizing technical execution and lessons learned.
- Short Communications: Brief reports communicating urgent findings, preliminary experimental data, or methodological critiques suitable for rapid dissemination.
Who Should Submit to SJAPUD?
SJAPUD is intended for researchers and practitioners who generate evidence-based scholarship on the built environment. Typical contributors include:
- Academic faculty and doctoral candidates in architecture, urban planning, landscape design, and civil systems.
- Practicing architects and urban designers conducting structured post-occupancy evaluations or developing novel computational design tools.
- Municipal planners, policy analysts, and housing economists evaluating spatial policies and regulatory frameworks.
- Building technologists and environmental engineers investigating material performance, building physics, and energy optimization.
Peer Review and Submission Standards
Each manuscript submitted to SJAPUD undergoes peer review by qualified architects, urban planners, and technical domain specialists. Reviewers evaluate submissions on research rigor, methodological clarity, contextual relevance, and contribution to sustainable built practice.
Submissions are managed through the SciMatic publishing workflow, which supports manuscript tracking and direct communication with editorial staff. Authors preparing manuscripts should ensure clear visual documentation, precise citations, and detailed descriptions of methodology, whether qualitative, quantitative, or design-led.
