Linyi City——A City Good for Investment

The reform and opening to the outside world has motivated the development of every sector and created several rising cities.The new cities have a strong opening spirit. They eagerly hope the outside world will get to know of them and that their products can enter the international market. For the purpose, beginning from this issue, China’s Foreign Trade will have a new section—Rising Cities, which will introduce certain cities’ economic development, investment environment, and export products to foreign and domestic readers, especially overseas friends from industrial and commercial sectors and enterprises.

Nexus security： governance, innovation and the resilient city

Nexus security is a compound mix of ideas： reconciling human needs and wants with access to multiple resources; diversity of access to those resources and services; resilience in the face of weather- and climate- related variability; resilience likewise in the face of infrastructure failure; and the personal, individual sense of belonging. At the level of Systems Thinking there is a very close relationship between resilience in the behavior of natural （ecological） systems and resilience in the social dynamics of governance within communities, where such resilience establishes the viability of these communities over centuries, which in turn entails successful stewardship of the man-environment relationship. We use insights from this cross-system mapping -- across natural, built, and human systems -- to assess, first, the role of city governance in achieving nexus security （or not） and, second, the role of technological innovations in serving the same purpose. More specifically, eight principles, covering resilience and diversity of access to resources and services, are used to gauge security-enhancing features of city buildings and infrastructure. Case studies include new designs of resilient office blocks, nutrient （nitrogen and phosphorus） recovery systems for sanitation and waste- water treatment, and the reconstruction of urban parks for the provision of ecosystem services. Throughout the paper, matters of risk in the face of meteorological variability are prominent. We do not conclude, however, that the presence of risk implies nexus insecurity.

Review of Good Cities,Better Lives:How Europe Discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism

Good Cities,Bet ter Lives:How Europe Discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism Author:Peter Hall,with contributions from Nicholas Falk Year:2014Publisher:Routledge ISBN:9780415840224(356 pages,in English)"‘What makes a good city?’might be a meaningless question."Lynch wrote at the beginning of Good City Form.Indeed,to define or

On water security, sustainability, and the water-food-energy-climate nexus

The role of water security in sustainable development and in the nexus of water, food, energy and climate interactions is examined from the starting point of the definition of water security offered by Grey and Sadoff. Much about the notion of security has to do with the presumption of scarcity in the resources required to meet human needs. The treatment of scarcity in mainstream economics is in turn examined, therefore, in relation to how each of us as individuals reconciles means with ends, a procedure at the core of the idea of sustainable development. According to the Grey-Sadoff definition, attaining water security amounts to achieving basic, single- sector water development as a precursor of more general, self-sustaining, multi-sectoral development. This is con- sistent with the way in which water is treated as ＂first among equals＂, i.e. privileged, in thinking about what is key in achieving security around the nexus of water, food, energy and climate. Cities, of course, are locations where demands for these multiple resource-energy flows are increasingly being generated. The paper discusses two important facets of security, i.e., diversity of access to resources and services （such as sanitation） and resilience in the behavior of coupled human-built-natural systems. Eight quasi-operational principles, by which to gauge nexus security with respect to city buildings and infrastructure, are developed.