The issue that is being presented now coincides with an unusual heat wave that once again forces us to talk about climate change and how to deal with it. Perhaps for this reason those articles that talk about nature and the city are appearing on a recurring basis, although from different perspectives, given the new sensitivity towards the problem that forces to administrations to work on the subject even more, so this type of actions are becoming the most frequent professional work in recent times.

But we cannot forget the situation in Ukraine, which raises the need, hopefully in a very short time, to reflect on the reconstruction of cities that have been destroyed or damaged to a greater or lesser extent, with a built heritage that not only has the dimension of a domestic heritage, but also of a historical heritage of the highest level, which should revive the debate on conservative and mimetic or innovative reconstruction, incorporating those uses and constructive elements, whether structural or decorative, that remain. It will undoubtedly also be an opportunity to refurbish these cities and improve their public spaces, a moment to reconsider the challenges of planning from urban regeneration, recovering memory, but also incorporating improvements that are often postponed.

In parallel there is also the issue of refugees. Although it is now focused on Ukraine again, derived from an armed conflict, it is still present in very different latitudes for this and other reasons, ranging from the climate emergency to food or political situations. Therefore, it affects diverse problems derived from the contexts in which they occur and increasingly requires working from the local level, taking into account the characteristics of the place and a diversification in emergency care.

The first article by AEU Arquitectos talks about the landscape built from changes in mobility favoring public transport and non-motorized means that they introduce in their project in the central area of ??Medellín and that will allow a more balanced relationship between the built environment and the natural. Nature, given its location in the tropics, becomes an essential element. This project is developed from one of the strategic lines proposed by the city administration: Improve the public space for coexistence and generate activities for its permanent vitality, which will lead to the consolidation of spaces of identity and roots through recognition of its memory and identity, under criteria of urban sustainability. Criteria of memory and identity that slide throughout this number with a great presence. The design premises in this case are mobility, the Medellin Viaduct-Line A, one of the physical barriers of the city, culture, art and the environment, accompanied by intervention strategies called: journey through memory, memory of identity, urban space and memory of the metro.

History and ruined or disappeared heritage have their presence from very different contexts and yet, with very close connotations in the design solutions that are presented, from minimal but effective interventions in the objectives set, such as the intervention in the town of Ruesta on Camino de Santiago and Oswiecym Great Synagogue Memorial Park.

We are in the Holy Year, which makes it timely to reflect on what the Camino de Santiago means for the dissemination of European culture and the creation of common features and bonds of union since the Middle Ages, as well as the great possibilities it has to revitalize territories in situations of depopulation and that, without these opportunities, have been declining. Actions such as those carried out in the Yesa environment based on master plans and with the contribution of the national, regional and local administrations. In this case, in the nucleus of Ruesta an action is specified that not only aims to revitalize the place but also its heritage values, assuming the intervention from the state of the ruin itself and what they offer. From a classic methodology of analysis and diagnosis, it is committed to the conservation of what exists, repairing the wall structure that remains open to the sky and open to the uses that may appear. Users create their own space. At the same time, the hermitages that give meaning to the Way are recovered, that of Santiago and that of San Juan, both outside the nucleus.

An interesting question: What is the future of informal urbanization? Informal urbanizations extend throughout all the continents and it is a problem to face as the urban population grows in the proportions that we are seeing. This question is answered from a specific project: the Outros Bairros Initiative in Cape Verde. This presents an experience that gives us the possibility of reflecting on policies that allow changing the contradictions that dominate planning and the growing disparities that dominate urbanization in the words of the author of the article presented here.

In recent times we have witnessed the enhancement of green infrastructure, a concept still under construction, but which from different disciplines contributes to the incorporation of nature in the city, with actions that range from urban design to public health approaches, but always linked to the protection and increase of biodiversity and the ecological importance of the territories on the edge of cities. An interpenetrating border, far removed from the country-city distinction that has accompanied the evolution of our cities until very recently.

Las Voras de Girona are presented to us as a research project that conceives the city from the infrastructural potential of the landscape, turning nature and landscape into synonyms. One more contribution to the understanding of infrastructure as a public facility that integrates the city with its surroundings, meshing urban green spaces and including agricultural, forest, river and transition spaces. As a contribution, it presents the design of differentiated management that allows different management regimes, explaining the concept in its practical application to Girona.

In the Memorial Park of the Great Synagogue we are told “The idea was to create a space of peace, installed among nature, that will evoke the feeling of being inside a temple. The trees will form a natural canopy over the memorial park.” It is a low-cost, sensitive and poetic project that leads to memory without acrimony, taking advantage of what could be considered industrial waste as material: sandstone slabs with a graphic created by accident during extraction in the quarry, as a gesture of opposition to the excessive exploitation of natural resources.

This issue ends with two urban design articles on very different scales. On the one hand, the organization of the Can Peguera facilities strip, a promenade in this neighborhood of Barcelona, not yet executed, accompanied by the preservation of a neighborhood of 20th-century workers' houses. Finally, the Gardens of the Vía Parque de Alicante, a project with an urban dimension with an area of 8 hectares. It supposes the creation of an urban landscape that is resolved in differentiated areas, in which the design from the vegetation, the furniture or the walls, there are important unevennesses, is treated with great care.