Urban

This book investigates how the state intervenes in the urban system in China in the post-reform period. To do so, it constructs a conceptual framework based on the perspective of political hierarchy, suggesting that the state power is hierarchically organized in China’s urban system, leading to variations in urban government capacities among cities.

This book highlights some problems and discusses possible solutions in terms of organisation, planning and management. The purpose of the book is to present selected chapters, of great importance for understanding the urban development issues, written by renowned authors in this scientific field.

Living in urban areas has long been recognized as a risk factor for mental illness despite the advantages of cities over villages. The impact of urbanization on mental health and stress is significant and is likely to increase over the next few years. Thus, considering the stress difference in the world cities and its increase, urban planners, urban managers, and urban designers should urgently consider it an essential principle in their plans and designs to reduce its side effects.
This book is a comprehensive guide for urban planners who seek to reduce urban stress in the urban environment but lack proper training and texts. Urban designers will have a unified vision to reduce urban stress caused by the appearance of the city environment. It will be useful for city managers and policymakers since this book identifies urban policies which reduce urban stress and stressful urban factors. Also, it will help urban psychologists, sociologists, architects, and social science researchers to better understand the relationship between their field and stress relief urban planning.

This book offers an essential introduction to a new urban planning and design methodology called Data Augmented Design (DAD) and its evolution and progresses, highlighting data driven methods, urban planning and design applications and related theories. The authors draw on many kinds of data, including big, open, and conventional data, and discuss cutting-edge technologies that illustrate DAD as a future-oriented design framework in terms of its focus on multi-data, multi-method, multi-stage and multi-scale sustainable urban planning.

This book investigates how the state intervenes in the urban system in China in the post-reform period. To do so, it constructs a conceptual framework based on the perspective of political hierarchy, suggesting that the state power is hierarchically organized in China’s urban system, leading to variations in urban government capacities among cities.

As a continuation of our award-winning book ‘China's City Cluster Development in the Race to Carbon Neutrality’, this book covers China's major urban changes over the last 30 years. Unlike the previous book, where we highlighted regional development issues, this book explicitly explores the city cases, particularly those that are considered core cities in China. Based on the micro-historical analysis of China's urbanization trend and urban development patterns, we see that cities in China have played a significant role in driving the country's sustainable development agenda. In a way, they have had both positive and negative impacts on achieving sustainable development. We look at these last three decades mainly because, during this period, China's urbanization became unprecedented, the central government made several pledges and signed many international agreements related to sustainable development, and China grew rapidly to become the second global economic power. Aligned with the overarching Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the more recent Carbon Neutrality Plan (CNP), Chinese core cities played a significant part in regional development, urban-rural relations, industrial clustering, the development of free trade zones and special economic zones, etc. All these recent developments are due to China's ongoing urbanization and urban development.