Global urbanization as a shifting context for applying ecological science toward the sustainable city

There is an abundance of conceptual frameworks relevant to sustainability in urban systems.However,to advance urban ecological science and its application to sustainable urban transformations,key existing frameworks must be synthesized.This paper is a conceptual synthesis cast in essay form in order to encompass a broad range of relevant ideas.It starts from the premise that the familiar models of metropolitan and megalopolitan urban structure,of industrially driven urban development,and of the contrasts between urban and non-urban lands are manifestly inadequate representations of evolving global reality.Such inadequacy is illustrated with examples from the United States and from China.Both the form and the interactions involved in contemporary urbanization and urban change suggest the need for a new integrated framework synthesizing two existing yet still evolving concepts:(1)The urban megaregion framework accommodates the spatial extent,interdigitation of contrasting land uses,and the linked spatial relations between nominally urban and nominally rural areas.(2)The new concept of the continuum of urbanity emphasizes the shifts in livelihood and lifestyle driven by regional and global teleconnections and their joint effects on local environments and landscapes.Together these frameworks suggest a common conceptual structure for addressing urban areas of different ages,sizes,forms,and dynamics in both urbanizing and urbanized areas in developing and developed countries and regions.The synthesis of frameworks points to empirical research needs,and has the potential to better match sustainability plans and actions with the diverse urban forms and dynamics now appearing around the world.

Reshaping the Relationship between Environment and Development:A Theoretical Framework under the Paradigm of Eco-civilization and Its Policy Implications

This study investigates the sustainability implications of the theoretical models of industrialization and urbanization pioneered by Dixit and Stiglitz^(1) so to open the theoretical “black box” of the unsustainability of the traditional industrialization mode, and shows how to reshape the relationship between the environment and development under the paradigm of ecological civilization. It finds that the theoretical models that “perfectly” simulate the traditional industrialization mode all have the implicit consequence of environmental unsustainability. Nonetheless, this limitation is not due to the problems of the models themselves but is more a result of the limitations of the traditional developmental and neoclassical economics paradigms of the industrial era. Therefore, the consequences of unsustainability cannot simply be avoided through external policies such as technological progress and environmental regulations, nor can they be prevented by simply adjusting some parameters in these theoretical models. Instead, a shift is required in both the developmental and the economics paradigms formed in the traditional industrial era. From an ecological civilization perspective, this study rethinks the basic issues of economics along the two lines of the ends(what) and the means(how) of development;briefly reviews the history of economic thought;and uses a conceptual framework to reorganize the relevant intellectual profundities that are neglected in standard neoclassical economics. The study further formalizes the conceptual framework in a general form model and shows how a paradigm shift in development could shift the trade-offs from the multiple goals of the economy, the environment, and well-being in the traditional industrial era to mutual reinforcement in ecocivilization.

Regardless if it is comedy,action,thriller,or biography:A review of urban crime in the 1980s cinema of Chicago

This study investigates the cinematic representation of city crime transactions in Chicago in the 1980s.The narrative nature of cinema provides an imaginative context for interpreting the physical and nonphysical dimensions of urban crimes.From a critical interpretive position,based on Peirce’s semiotics,this study uses“urban cinesemiotics”as the method to select image signs,identify their associated Chicagoan objects,and interpret their designoriented meaning.The theoretical roots of crime prevention through environmental design constitute the basis for the interpretation of movies.A total of 27 crime-related scenes from 9 Chicagoan movies made in the 1980s illustrate that most urban settings suffer from the lack of crime-preventive environmental design.In particular,natural surveillance(eyes on the street),encounter and enclosure,and border vacuums are major environmental factors that affect urban crimes in Chicago.Some crime scenes also depict why environmental design cannot influence individuals’criminal intentions necessarily nor can they solve urban safety single-handedly.

Multifaceted perspective on North American urban development

This study offers a multifaceted perspective on the history and theory of North American urban development.It extends a framework that deconstructs the complex urban evolution process into the three stages of assembly,disassembly,and reassembly.Urban development is explained through planning,architectural and critical theoretical perspectives.This study examines the inextricable links among land use regulations,public policies,transportation,urban economics,and communication technologies and underlines their impacts on shaping suburbia and downtown redevelopments.It argues that today’s revived traditional cores and medium-to-high-density mixed use developments are not mere incarnations of historic urban models.Despite responding to certain real-market demands for livable and vibrant urban environments,these quasi-traditional developments are driven by globalization forces and facilitated by cutting-edge technological advancements.Using combined evidence from theoretical investigations and interviews with experienced professionals,this research demonstrates the complexity and multidimensionality of urban development processes that require in-depth understanding of current global socioeconomic and technological transformations.

Measuring Resilience in the Assumed City

The malleable nature of both the idea of a city and the idea of resilience raises an important question—why measure?Resilience is assumed to be located in the physical infrastructure of specific places or as a quality of the people located there.For disasters,we are often trying to conceptualize,measure,or render legible resilience in physical structures.But what is it that we are trying to measure,and is the idea of a city reflected in these measurements?If cities are organized around something other than resilience,is resilience their natural by-product?What is necessitating the need for increased—and measured—resilience?Using interpretive policy analysis,we explored five well known disaster resilience frameworks(UNDRR's Making Cities Resilient Campaign,UN-Habitat's City Resilience Profiling Programme,The World Bank and GFDRR's Resilient Cities Program,Arup and The Rockefeller Foundation's City Resilience Index,and The Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities)to identify the working definition of‘‘city''and of‘‘resilience.''We conclude that if the demand for cities to become more resilient is an acknowledgment of the risk produced by globalized urbanization,then the call itself is an indictment of the current state of our cities.

空间正义研究的知识结构、演变过程和新趋势--以CiteSpace分析为基础的科学计量学回顾研究

By applying the computational tool CiteSpace,the paper explored 9,553 documents relevant to spatial justice research from the Web of Science Core Collection and their 384,786 references.With the visualization of the document/author co-citation and co-author/term network and the detection of pivotal nodes,the knowledge structure,evolution process,and emerging trends of spatial justice research have been teased out.The findings revealed that the spatial justice research is mainly supported by geography,environmental science,and urban studies and planning.Having formed 15 document co-citation clusters since 1993,the mainstream of the research directions consists of distributive justice in geography and socio-spatial relationship focusing on specific vulnerable groups.Four stages of the spatial justice research,combined with a comparative view on spatial equality,equity,and justice,depicted how its concept grew up from describing the subtle relationship between space and justice to a specific research topic accompanied by research collaboration network.Learning from environmental justice,spatial justice has been developing its indepth theories and methodologies since the 2000s,but still lacking sufficient connection with each other.Its recent research enjoys the diversity of researching orientation,scale,and object.The continuous improvement of spatial justice assessment has helped to introduce spatial justice towards a new researching domain,while there also has been a tendency of the return of theoretical study in the recent decade.This scientometric review demonstrates a relatively comprehensive measurement of spatial justice research,which establishes the background for future theoretical approaches and provides practical instructions for spatial justice participatory development and social activities.

Planetary Urbanisation and the Built Heritage from a Non-Western Perspective: The Question of ‘How' We Should Protect the Past

The process of planetary urbanisation,which is currently affecting a large part of the world,impacts on the existing built environment in an unprecedented way.Its dramatic rapidity often implies the sudden disappearance of traditional urban and rural structures and the rapid transformation of local cultures.Contextually,as never before,attempts to protect culture in its tangible and intangible expressions are increasingly central to international agendas on sustainable urbanisation.However,this is by no means an easy task to achieve.The main reason for the controversy is that the consensus around the need to protect heritage and its tools,as formulated primarily in the Western world in the past,has changed.It has been challenged by alternative,non-Western,primarily non-materialistic views,or it has been delegitimised by the(often)exploitative practice of heritagisation,as a result of the process of protection itself.The main aim of this paper is to reflect on the implications of contemporary planetary urbanisation on the built heritage and its protection,considering that most of this process is taking place in fast-developing countries of Asia,Africa and South America and,at the same time,there is a redistribution of economic(and therefore cultural)power from the West to the East,and from the North to the South of the planet.