As the Editor-in-Chief of"Frontiers of Architecture Research,"I am glad to see several papers related to urban design published in this issue.These papers explore the urban design theory and practice from different di-mensions and perspectives.Some work studied the rela-tionship between smart cities and empathetic cities.They found that the concept of smart cities mainly focuses on technology and efficiency.However,social justice and people-oriented requires more attention.This work pro-posed that future cities need to follow the empathy principle of participatory governance.Another work focused on analyzing the rational layout of large-scale commercial facilities in cities through digital means.