Eco-Cities: A Planning Guide (Applied Ecology and Environmental Management) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1138077062 ISBN 13: 9781138077065

Publisher: CRC Press, 2017

Synopsis

As cities undergo vast changes due to industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, environmental considerations assume a growing importance in the urban planning processes of an increasing number of governments around the world. Several cities and regions around the world have already enacted policies that signal the emergence of a paradigm of sustainability in eco-cities planning. Providing an overview of urban ecosystem structure, function, and change, Eco-Cities: A Planning Guide addresses how to successfully accomplish eco-city planning that meets government requirements. It adds a new dimension to the understanding and application of the concept of urban sustainability, based on hypotheses about feedback between social and biogeophysical processes.

Emphasizing integration, the first part of the book discusses various aspects of planning theory. It presents three innovative theories for socioeconomic models: a theory on the locational choices made by households and firms, an urban version of the stream continuum concept, and an application of metacommunity theory to the fragmented urban biota. These theories raise new urban planning questions and stimulate integrated modeling. The book also introduces urban planning modeling that uses existing social, vegetation, ecohydrological, and ecosystem service modules but is refined and operated for enhanced cross-disciplinary integration and prediction. The second part of the book consists of several case studies of Chinese eco-cities covering a majority of the urban development patterns that offer in-depth examples of planning practices currently in use.

Drawing on experimentation, comparison, long-term measurement, and modeling, this fascinating guide helps readers better understand eco-cities and eco-landscapes as integrated, spatially extensive, complex adaptive systems. It lays a solid foundation for engagement between urban planners, researchers, educators, policy makers, and citizens as they work to adapt to changing environmental, social, and economic conditions.

About this title

About the Author

Zhifeng Yang is a professor and the dean of the School of Environment at Beijing Normal University. His research areas include urban ecological planning and management. He has authored more than 10 books on urban planning, water resources management, and ecological engineering, and has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles. Professor Yang is an associate editor of the Journal of Environmental Informatics and the Journal of Environmental Sciences, and a guest editor of Ecological Modelling and Ecological Informatics. He is also an editorial member of the Journal of Hydrodynamics, Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation, and Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering in China.

From the Back Cover

This guide provides an overview of urban ecosystem structures, functions, and changes and discusses how to successfully accomplish eco-city planning based on government requirements. It adds a new dimension to the understanding and the application of the concept of urban sustainability, based on hypotheses about social and biogeophysical processes and through in-depth case studies. It presents three novel theories for socioeconomic metabolic models and discusses total urban ecosystem health using both the traditional environmental analysis method and emergy and exergy as holistic indicators.

Edition details

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138077062
• ISBN 13: 9781138077065
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 620
• Editor: Yang Zhifeng