The new urbanisation necessitates the upgrading of urban governance and spatial planning and design. Landscape Architecture Frontiers accentuates the intelligence on urban growth and physical construction for years. In this issue, LA Frontiers focuses on the topics about urban governance and spatial quality improvement under the promotion of inventory planning and governance refinement, including: 1) Urban village (micro-) renewals, waterfront revitalisation, and industrial, cultural, and historical heritage regeneration; 2) Public participation, community engagement, and other polycentric urban governance modes and inclusive design approaches; 3) The resilience of urban planning and design against sudden disasters and public health emergencies and crises; 4) Diagnoses on the working systems/mechanisms that support the upgrades of urban governance and public space construction, through lenses of Economic Sociology. By gathering cutting edge research with international outlooks and presenting latest practice examples among China and abroad, LA Frontiers might offer a new prospective that helps professionals interpret associated governance and planning policies, inform practitioners the goals and roadmaps of public empowerment, navigate planners and designers with flexible implementation and management guidelines, to eventually improve the spatial quality of public places, as well as the overall benefits in society, ecology, and economy.

This issue focuses on: 1) Exploring the significance of territorial spatial planning by stressing its necessity and main ideas under the contemporary background of ecological civilisation construction in China, while re-examining the role of landscape architects in this reform. 2) Strengthening research on related methodologies and techniques of urban ecological planning, ecological security pattern, ecological infrastructure, and ecological restoration to improve cities liveability and resilience and rebuild harmonious human-nature relationship under a mandatory planning framework combined with resilient measures, avoiding inflexible ecological conservation practices. 3) Analysing and learning from diversified efforts made by different countries and regions to promote urban development while protecting ecosystems, particularly their experience on territorial, regional, and urban planning that is significantly valuable to the Chinese counterpart, to leverage the value of territorial natural resources. 4) Exploring feasible approaches that help restore urban ecosystem structure and ecological elements, and improve planning and design methods on specific sites, so as to enhance spatial construction and ecological quality, to eventually improve a national eco-security pattern with scientific and user-friendly planning and design. 5) Encouraging applications of research frontiers in geology, macro-ecology, regional economics, public management, and sustainability science.