Low Carbon City And New Type Urbanization

In the face of increasingly serious resource and environmental challenges, the world has already accepted low-carbon development as the main way forward for future city construction. Chinese cities have encountered many problems during their development, including land constraints, energy shortages, traffic congestion and air pollution. For this reason, the national meeting of the Central Work Conference on Urbanization made the strategic decision to take a new approach to urbanization and indicated that in future the key features of urbanization in China will be low-carbon development and harmony between the environment and resources. This book discusses the "low-carbon city" as the new pattern of Chinese urbanization. This represents a major change and takes "intensive land use,” “intelligent,” “green” and “low carbon" as its key words. Low carbon will become an important future development direction for Chinese urbanization development. In the twenty-first Century in response to the global climate change, countries have started a wave of low-carbon city construction. But in China, there are still many disputes and misunderstandings surrounding the issue. Due to a lack of research, low-carbon city construction in China is still in the early stages, and while there have been successes, there have also been failures. There are complex and diverse challenges in applying low-carbon development methods in the context of today’s Chinese cities. The construction of low-carbon cities requires efficient government, the technological innovation of enterprises, and professional scholars, but also efforts on the part of the public to change their daily activities. Based on the above considerations, the collection brings together experts from urban planning and design, clean-energy systems, low-carbon transportation, new types of city infrastructure and smart cities etc., in the hope of forming some solutions for Chinese low-carbon city development.

This book examines the sustainability transition theory in the context of urbanization in China, tracing the development of eco and low-carbon cities. It examines how ideas on building eco-cities and low-carbon cities travel from nation to nation, how they are adopted in the Chinese administrative context and what role inter-scalar actors play in getting the ideas transferred, translated and operationalized on the ground. Offering an overarching theoretical framework that incorporates all urban sustainability experiments in China, the book conducts a comprehensive analysis of the master plans of these new towns and summarizes the normative transition targets of sustainable urban experiments. It explores how they differ from each other and how they influence transition dynamics in practice. By examining four eco and low-carbon new towns deemed representative of current major approaches to sustainability transition management in China, the book provides a detailed depiction of generic transition management and explains the different transitional trajectories for each type of sustainable urban experiment. It demonstrates how subnational-level and city-level transitions mediate the national transition. Through a thorough inquiry into inter-scalar dynamics, institutional arrangements and techno-social innovations in sustainable urban experiments, the book links generalized transition rules and specific contexts to present a full view of the challenges, failures and territorial problems of eco and low-carbon new towns. This book makes a novel contribution to the study of Chinese urbanization by revisiting issues and problems of contemporary urban China. The reflection on these urban issues will provide implications to policymakers, professionals and the common reader interested in the future sustainable urbanism in China.

This book summarizes experiences from the World Bank s activities related to low-carbon urban development in China. It highlights the need for low-carbon city development and presents details on specific sector-level experiences and lessons, a framework for action, and financing opportunities.

The continuing rapid growth and development of China's cities brings many complex challenges. Tasked with supporting strong economic development that provides jobs and a good quality of life for its growing number of residents, China's cities also must ensure sustainable development in line with national efforts to transition to a less carbon-intensive economy, as outlined in China's 12th Five-Year Plan. Sustainable Low-Carbon City Development in China summarizes, through the specific lens of low-carbon development, the lessons of the World Bank's activities related to sustainable urban development in China. The various chapters present overall approaches and achievements in low-carbon city developments and highlight specific experiences across all urban sectors, including energy, transport, solid waste, water, and waste water. The book also explores cities' role in climate adaptation and opportunities presented by carbon finance and other global mechanisms to finance low-carbon city development. The World Bank project data and experience combined with the national and international experience presented in this edited book deliver both a broad picture and actionable steps for China's urban development. The chapters argue that China's cities not only need to, but also have an opportunity and the ability to integrate sustainable low-carbon development in their urban development. Low-carbon efforts align closely with the sustainable urbanization agenda and the book points to multiple benefits, such as improved air quality and urban livability, that can be derived from implementing this urgent agenda. The intended audience of this edited book is government officials of municipalities, cities, and townships in China who will be defining policies and programs to achieve the targets of economic growth and carbon emission reductions emerging from the 12th Five-Year Plan. The lessons presented may also be of interest to other countries and development partners supporting low-carbon urban programs.

Urban areas are increasingly contributing to climate change while also suffering many of its impacts. Moreover, many cities, particularly in developing countries, continue to struggle to provide services, infrastructure and socio-economic opportunities. How do we achieve the global goals on climate change and also make room for allowing global urban development? Increasing levels of awareness and engagement on climate change at the local level, coupled with recent global agreements on climate and development goals, as well as the New Urban Agenda emerging from Habitat III, present an unprecedented opportunity to radically rethink how we develop and manage our cities. Urbanization and Climate Co-Benefits examines the main opportunities and challenges to the implementation of a co-benefits approach in urban areas. Drawing on the results of empirical research carried out in Brazil, China, Indonesia, South Africa, India and Japan, the book is divided into two parts. The first part uses a common framework to analyse co-benefits across the urban sectors. The second part examines the tools and legal and governance perspectives at the local and international level that can help in planning for co-benefits. This book will be of great interest to students, practitioners and scholars of urban studies, climate/development policy and environmental studies.

Cities face critical challenges connected to population growth, urbanisation, and climate change. Fundamental transformations in urban planning, community design, and infrastructure development are absolutely needed to address the problems raised by land use changes. A transition from conventional urban development models to a green or low-carbon future needs to change the system of the systems, such as energy, water, waste, mobility, and infrastructure systems. Cities are facing huge pressure and great opportunities to make these transitions through more effective arrangement of land use development footprints. This book introduces the significant trend of urban planning towards green growth and low-carbon development patterns and reviews the history of urban development models while illustrating key concepts underpinning theories of green growth and low-carbon development.-

Low Carbon Cities is a book for practitioners, students and scholars in architecture, urban planning and design. It features essays on ecologically sustainable cities by leading exponents of urban sustainability, case studies of the new directions low carbon cities might take and investigations of how we can mitigate urban heat stress in our cities’ microclimates. The book explores the underlying dimensions of how existing cities can be transformed into low carbon urban systems and describes the design of low carbon cities in theory and practice. It considers the connections between low carbon cities and sustainable design, social and individual values, public space, housing affordability, public transport and urban microclimates. Given the rapid urbanisation underway globally, and the need for all our cities to operate more sustainably, we need to think about how spatial planning and design can help transform urban systems to create low carbon cities, and this book provides key insights.