This book's objective is to present a comprehensive, theoretical, practical, and adaptive approach to understanding the issues involved in eco-city planning and green community development. It builds on recent advances in urban theories, environmental science, architectural design, engineering, and geospatial information technologies to provide readers with the scientific foundation needed to understand the major visionary ideas about new urban forms. This book provides a basis of knowledge in planning theory and natural science and a major review of urban forms that have evolved over the past century; its primary emphasis is to describe and explain emerging approaches, methods, and techniques for eco-city. This book also responds to the key questions outlined at the beginning of this introduction: What are the theoretical foundations and historical views of eco-city and green community? What is a green and eco-friendly urban form? How can we find the appropriate approaches to build eco-city and green community? What international experiences and lessons can we learn from?

Questions of how the design of cities can respond to the challenge of climate change dominate the thoughts of urban planners and designers across the U.S. and Canada. With admirable clarity, Patrick Condon responds to these questions. He addresses transportation, housing equity, job distribution, economic development, and ecological systems issues and synthesizes his knowledge and research into a simple-to-understand set of urban design recommendations. No other book so clearly connects the form of our cities to their ecological, economic, and social consequences. No other book takes on this breadth of complex and contentious issues and distills them down to such convincing and practical solutions.

This classic text is a practical vision of how different types of communities can make the transition to a sustainable way of life that balances production and consumption, reduces resource waste and produces long-term social and ecological health. Our old patterns of growth are built on isolation-an isolation from the environment, an isolation between activities and ultimately an isolation between individuals. Whether city or suburb, these qualities of isolation are the same. Buildings ignore climate and place, uses are zoned into separate areas, and individuals are isolated by a lack of convivial public places. Sustainable patterns break down the separations; buildings respond to the climate rather than overpowering it, mixed uses draw activities and people together, and shared spaces reestablish community. -from Sustainable Communities

Eco-cities and Green Transport presents a systematic, uniform, and structured way to examine different cities at different scales in order to suggest unique solutions appropriate to each scale. The book examines city infrastructure and the built environment, transport system supply and demand, and transport behavior to offer innovative policy solutions for various transport modes. With end of chapter experiences and lessons summarized, the book provides an in-depth analysis of the advantages and disadvantages for transforming cities and their transport systems to meet residents current and future needs. The increasingly rapid growth of global urbanization requires cities to be built in an ecologically sustainable, energy efficient, and livable way. A critical component in achieving these goals is an urban transportation system that uses natural resources as reasonably as possible. The outcome of a ten-year data collection research effort by the author and his team, the book sheds new insights into these challenges using a thorough investigation of traffic systems in 20 cities from 13 countries throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. - Summarizes the essential experiences of green transport projects from cities around the world - Analyzes projects using a consistent structure, allowing comparison of best practices and policy approaches - Overviews the latest sustainable urban transportation concepts, tools, and best practices

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.

Eco-city planning is a key element of urban land use planning in perspective and of ongoing debate of environmental urban sustainable development with a spatial and practical dimension. The conceptual basis of ecological planning is that we can no longer afford to be merely human-centred in approach. Instead, the interdependency of human and non-human species has forced us to appreciate the ‘rights’ and ‘intrinsic values’ of non-human species in our pursuit for a sustainable ecosystem. This volume has as approach an emphasis on environmental planning policies whereby, for example, energy saving, anti-pollution measures, use of non-car modes, construction of green buildings, safeguarding of nature and natural habitats in urban areas, and use of more renewable resources are promotional norms. Their aims and leading outcome serve to protect the Earth from adverse effects of global warming and different sources of pollution threatening the quality of life of human societies.

This book deals with practical ways to reach a more sustainable state in urban areas through such tools as strategic environmental assessment, sustainability assessment, direction analysis, baseline setting and progress measurement, sustainability targets, and ecological footprint analysis.