Search results

Cities are “built thought”; they represent the most materialised form of the relation between society and environment. Thus, in a special sense, cities worldwide have become a symbol of the environmental crisis, of the transformation of valuable natural resources into waste and pollutants. Cities, however, have also always been places of innovations. Solutions emanate from people whose living conditions are threatened. Many signs indicate that the time is ripe for basic changes in production and consumption processes, in people′s attitudes and behaviour, and also in the built‐up structures of cities. This article, therefore, introduces the concept of “ecological urban restructuring”. The concept was theoretically developed and empirically tested in an international comparative research project. The three main elements of the concept are: (1) eight points of orientation as general guidelines; (2) fields of action and building blocks as methodological aids for integrated strategies; (3) concept of ecological neighbourhood development as a concept for action on the urban neighbourhood level. Finally, an overview is given on recent initiatives by international organisations on the topic of urban ecology.

The purpose of this paper is the comparison of Local Agenda 21 – sustainability plan implementation and research activity between Europe, North America and India.

Intensive literature and web search for European, North American and Indian Local Agenda 21 sustainability planning and implementation status.

Close to 6,000 sustainability plans have been prepared for European communities versus about 100 for North American communities. A total of 20 Indian cities have started sustainability planning efforts. There is an extensive support network for European communities and much less so or North American and Indian communities. Most sustainability/biodiversity/urban ecosystems research is ongoing in Europe and North America and there is a beginning surge of activity in India.

Knowledge of Local Agenda 21 implementation status between these three regions can hopefully spur more activity in North America and India. Comparisons of applicable planning innovations and approaches could be useful.

There has not been a comparison of Local Agenda 21 implementation that compares Europe, North America and India. There have been some reviews respective to each region.

Urban stream ecosystems have often been seen as channels of water flow rather than as the valuable parts of an urban green space system providing ecosystem services. The study seeks to address the importance of urban stream ecosystems from the perspective of urban ecology, human health and social well‐being in the context of urban planning.

The case study area is the Rekolanoja stream ecosystem in the City of Vantaa, southern Finland. The data from the case study area were gathered from existing ecological studies and by conducting semi‐structured interviews, a resident inquiry and a writing contest.

The results from the Rekolanoja case show that intense management of the streamside vegetation and treatment of the stream channel in construction projects have decreased species richness and diminished valuable streamside biotopes. However, the stream corridor can function as an important recreational and educational element within the local green space network and thereby become a symbol of local identity.

Planners, decision‐makers and other interest groups can use the findings from this study in determining the values of small urban stream ecosystems in urban development.

The Rekolanoja case indicates that planners and residents see the value of such an aquatic element as increasingly important for urban biodiversity and ecological corridor functions, as well as for local human health and social well‐being, e.g. recreation and stress relief. Future land‐use decisions will show whether a genuine change in the values and thinking of planners and decision‐makers is taking place.

Climate change is occurring around us and impacting on our daily lives, meaning that we have to deal with our cities in a different way. There is also increasing awareness of the need for daily contact with green spaces and the natural environment in order to live a happy, productive and meaningful life.

This reflective essay tells the narrative of how urbanisation has been disconnecting humans from nature. Non-sustainable, non-resilient patterns of urbanisation, along with the neglect of inner-city areas, have resulted in fragmentation and urban decline, led to a loss of biodiversity, and caused the deterioration of ecosystems and their services. Urban regeneration projects allow us to “repair” and restore some of this damage whilst enhancing urban resilience. Connecting existing and enhanced ecosystems, and re-establishing ecosystems both within cities and at the peri-urban fringe is vital for strengthening ecosystem resilience and building adaptive capacity for coping with the effects of climate change.

Cities worldwide need to look for suitable solutions to increase the resilience of their urban spaces in the face of climate change. This essay explores how this can be achieved through the integration of nature-based solutions, the re-greening of neighbourhoods and by correctly attributing value to natural capital. Transforming existing cities and neighbourhoods in this way will enable ecosystems to contribute their services towards healthier and more liveable cities.

Urban spatial form influences the social, economic, and ecological development modes of the city. The spatial form during the urbanization of Hanjiang River Basin in Southern Shaanxi needs to be studied. In this study, research methodologies on urban spatial form in China and abroad were summarized. The concept of ecology background was applied, and the research framework for urban spatial form, which integrated the background, framework, core, axis, cluster, and skin, was established. Valley cities in the Hanjiang River Basin in Southern Shaanxi were classified into wide valley, narrow valley, and canyon cities. The spatial form characteristics of these three types of valley cities were discussed. A case study based on a typical city-Yang County-was conducted to discuss the characteristics of the aforementioned six elements of urban spatial form. Finally, spatial form characteristics were summarized. These characteristics provide a basis for the study of the small valley urban spatial form in the Hanjiang River Basin in Southern Shaanxi.

With the development of social economy, the urbanization of the world has presented a new development trend. The green, ecological, and economic city has gradually attracted people's attention. How to plan new cities and towns to coordinate economic development with nature has been the focus of domestic and foreign scholars. Based on this premise, this article elaborates the domestic and foreign research status of ecological city and puts forward a new type of green ecological civilization from the perspective of evolution of civilization. From the perspective of green ecological economy, the evolution of China's urban planning is studied in terms of the urban and rural areas, nature, pollution, industry, culture, and other aspects. To accumulate experience, green ecological planning in New York is also analyzed at multiple levels, such as urban expansion, energy, and urban water use. According to the development of our country in the past 30 years, the development strategy of urbanization suitable to China's national conditions is introduced on the basis of ecological economy. From the perspective of green ecological planning and economy, practice has proved that new urban planning is able to promote the establishment of a resource-saving society, to enhance the coordinated development of the population, resources, environment, and economy, and to comprehensively improve people's quality of life.

On the basis of the research data of 120 enterprises from 10 development zones in Gansu Province, we conducted regional planning research combining enterprise architecture with ecological green space environment system. We determined that the largest part of the green space pattern is the “other green space,” which mainly depends on the formation of super large plantation. However, this part is consistently decreasing in recent years. Affiliated green space became the largest in the green space patterns because of the high degree of vertical greening of the enterprise architecture in the development zones. The high fragmentation of the affiliated green space also leads to the high fragmentation of the entire green space of the development zone. In future regional planning of development zones, future planning of the green space can take the current green space as the basis, use the road green space and green corridors nearby waters as the basic framework to connect other patterns of green space, and form a ring-shaped enclosure, reticular structure, and wedge-shaped and dotted supplemented regional pattern. Meanwhile, the road green space system can be reasonably arranged by setting new green space spots at road intersections and key strategic positions to connect the isolated green space patches and improve the connectivity of the green space.

This paper aims to focus on increasingly entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance in the country’s second city Cork, where neoliberal strategy has driven uneven spatial development.

This paper combines insights from literature review with new knowledge derived from interviews with key informants in the city.

Post-colonial themes provoke a consideration of how uneven power dynamics stifle social innovation in the built environment.

Assembled narratives expose opaque aspects of governance, ownership and participation, presenting opportunities for rethinking urban vacancy through placemaking.

These draw on nuanced models for tourism as a platform for a broader discourse on rights to the city.

A century after independence, Ireland is recast as a leading small European economy, away from historical framings of a rural economic backwater of the British Empire.

The model of success is based on a basket of targeted investment policies and somewhat dubious indicators for growth.

Land policy plays an important role in urban development planning. The value of land use depends on the nature and scale of urban land use. Based on this, in the study and analysis, the adaptation between regional land finance and urban planning and construction was discussed. First of all, the current incoordination between the land policy and the urban planning and construction in the development of urbanization was elaborated, and the status quo of the research was analyzed; then, the coordination of the layout of the urban planning space under the land finance was analyzed; taking a small-town project as an example, the actual planning of towns was concretely analyzed, and the waterfront landscape was planned and designed, the functional utilization of the land was promoted. Regression analysis of adaptation confirmed the success of urban planning and construction.

The sheer complexity and unpredictability characterising cities challenges the adequacy of existing disciplinary knowledge and tools in urban design and highlights the necessity to incorporate explicitly the element of change and the dimension of time in the understanding of, and intervention on, the form of cities. To this regard the concept of resilience is a powerful lens through which to understand and engage with a changing world. However, resilience is currently only superficially addressed by urban designers, and an explicit effort to relate elements of urban form to resilience principles is still lacking. This represents a great limit for urban designers, as the physical dimension of cities is the matter they work with in the first place. In this paper, we combine established knowledge in urban morphology and resilience theory. We firstly look at resilience theory and consistently define five proxies of resilience in urban form, namely diversity, redundancy, modularity, connectivity and efficiency. Secondly, we discuss the configuration of, and interdependencies between, several constituent elements of the physical city, as defined in urban morphology and design, in light of the mentioned five proxies. Finally, we conduct this exploration at five scales that are relevant to urban morphology and design: plot, street edge, block, street and sanctuary area / district.