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.