China’s megacities have long faced pressure on the supply of affordable housing due to population influx. As potential affordable living space, basement has not been effectively used due to poor physical condition and high security risk. After years of exploration, the government of New York City officially passed the revision of local building codes in 2019, and carried out the Basement Apartment Conversion Pilot Project (BACPP) in East New York. This paper introduces its working process, implementation mechanism and key strategies of the legalization of underground space, and analyzes the specific measures of regulatory revisions, government loan support, and housing rent control. This study provides insights into inclusive governance of informal underground living space in China’s megacities.

From the perspective of urban planning, the current global megacity governance faces the triple challenges of equity and efficiency in public service provision, risk management and sustainable development, and the construction of a multi-actor governance system. Community planning & community governance is the key to meet these challenges. Taking five megacities, London, Tokyo, New York, Beijing and Shanghai as examples, this special issue aims to analyze, compare, and rethink the new contents and approaches of community planning in each megacity in terms of power division, economic revitalization, social inclusion and resilience. Then it provides ideas to the community planning and construction of other Chinese cities in the future.

The Localism Act 2011 demonstrates a shift from regional plans and structure plans towards neighbourhood development plans (NDPs) as a new planning layer where neighbours are increasingly essential unties for local governance. This shift demonstrates dual objectives: centralising power to promote more development on the one hand; and devolving other powers down to the local, and the interactions between these two aims characterising of the UK’s current planning system. This paper reviews the backdrop in which the concept of NDP was born and how it has been employed in refined neighbourhoods within London’s urban and rural areas for demonstrating the varying features of NDPs across spaces and cases. It ends with a discussion

on the initial approaches to NDPs as a planning tool for any emerging communities in modern megacities as a reference.

This paper discusses the collaborative turn of town development to address the emergent models of community governance. It builds on the empirical studies of three representative areas in Tokyo: two centrally located neighbourhoods and one peripheral town. All of them are facing a twofold challenge: (1) how to (re)build local community from divided newcomers and traditional landowners; (2) how to generate collaborative town development with the participation of government, diverse local residents and third parties. Through the analytical reading of each case’s socio-spatial evolution and contextualised practices of community development at various scales, this paper reveals the changing power dynamics between actors in the emerging local governance network. As a result, it demonstrates three local experiments of collaborative town development: associational development, progressive conservation vision, and intermediate support. We argue that future community planning (encompassing placemaking and governance) should recognise the diverse actors and their potential cooperations, as well as reconsider the mediate role of urban professions in building a shared vision of community development.

With the process of urbanization and globalization, global megacities have entered an era of high-risk society, while the complexity, uncertainty and diffusion of risks are also increasing. Therefore, the establishment of resilient system has become significant. Due to high aggregation, mobility and global dependence, megacities are facing more comprehensive risk challenges. As the most basic urban governance unit, communities are particularly important in the framework of resilient building system. Therefore, this paper reviews the theoretical and practical evolution of resilient community planning, and then selects key factors as the participants, management mechanism, planning tools and integrated system to analyze NYC’s practices. Through analyzing the cases of 197-a planning (community-based planning), emergency response network (management system), waterfront community zoning (special zoning tools) and PLACES Initiative (whole community approach), this paper discusses how Chinese cities can learn from NYC’s practices on the construction of resilient community in domestic megacities from the aspects of policy tools, decisionmaking mechanism and implementation paths.