Urban planning is a complex decision making process which must compensate for the various interests of multiple stakeholders with respect to physical, social, and economic constraints. Despite growing interest in using A.I. in urban design and planning this community remains a field dominated by human experts. Recent catastrophic disasters such as hurricane Katrina, however, have underscored th...

China’s economic reform is a gradual and exploratory process, which has stimulated the dramatic growth and restructuring of the Chinese cities, but has also made urban master plans quickly outdated and unable to function effectively to guide the development of cities. Through a case study of Hangzhou, the paper argues that the gradual and exploratory nature of China’s reform is incompatible wit...

This research examines government policies and urban transformation in China through a study of Hangzhou City, which is undergoing dramatic growth and restructuring. As the southern center of the Yangtze River Delta, an emerging global city region of China, Hangzhou has been restlessly searching for strategies to promote economic growth and survive the competition with Shanghai. This paper anal...

Waste is a symbol of inefficiency in modern society and represents misallocated resources. This paper outlines an on-going interdisciplinary research project entitled ―Integrated ETWW demand forecasting and scenario planning for low-carbon precincts‖ and reports on first findings and a literature review. This large multi-stakeholder research project develops a shared platform for integrated ETW...

An urban forest assessment is essential for developing a baseline from which to measure changes and trends. The most precise way to assess urban forests is to measure and record every tree on a site, but although this may work well for relatively small populations (e.g., street trees, small parks), it is prohibitively expensive for large tree populations. Thus, random sampling offers a cost-eff...

This study aims to highlight the changing relationships between the city and its modes of representation, through an examination of the historical transformations of Kunming, a city on the southwest borderland of China. Our intention here is to introduce to the reader particular characteristics of urban space in Kunming as the basis for a more detailed examination of the historical differences ...

Over the next thirty years, the world’s population is expected to grow by nearly one-third, but this growth will be highly concentrated in the urban areas of poor, developing countries (United Nations, 2002). Of the anticipated 2 billion persons to be added to the world’s total by the year 2030, fully 1.9 billion are expected to reside in the cities and towns of Africa, Asia, and Latin America ...

Carbon reduction at the household level is an integral part of carbon mitigation. This study analyses the characteristics, effects, contributing factors and policies for urban household carbon emissions in the Yangtze River Delta of China. Primary data was collected through structured questionnaire surveys in three cities in the region--Nanjing, Ningbo, and Changzhou in 2011. The survey data wa...

Over recent decades, the study of psychological restoration has attracted a considerable amount of interest within and without the boundaries of environmental psychology, with most of the work focused on analyzing restoration in natural contexts. However, little attention has been paid to the (possible) restorative potential of urban settings, as they have usually been expected not to be restor...

Globalization and market reforms have significantly facilitated urban transition and urbanization in the People’s Republic of China, greatly affecting the structural and spatial redistribution of Chinese cities since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Prior to the 1978 economic reforms, the system of cities created by the Maoist regime was dominated by large and extra-large cities b...