Shanghai's urban environmental management in the past three decades has been focused primarily on the environmental problems at the intra-urban level. While this 'end of pipe' approach greatly mitigated domestic and industrial pollution, progresses were much slower in dealing with environmental...

Cities are widely defined as complex systems formed by coupled social, ecological and economical systems. The complexity of urban dynamics goes far beyond its boundaries due to the strong influence of larger scales and the deep dependence of cities on outside resources. Such crucial cross-scale...

This paper examines the Portland experience as America’s most widely regarded example of urban sustainability. It suggests that appearances are deceptive. It compares some characteristics of development in Portland with similar trends in Los Angeles, not known as an exemplar of...

This report on the Korean Strategy for Green Growth and its implementation in urban areas assesses the contributions of sub-national governments to Korea's National Strategy for Green Growth and identifies the main challenges for effective implementation at the local level. Korea's economy,...

This report examines the current state of knowledge about green growth in cities and outlines the key research questions and protocols that will guide the OECD Green Cities programme. It builds the case for an urban green growth agenda by examining the economic and environmental conditions that...

In a recent work Nathan and Reddy (2011a) have proposed a Multi-view Black-box (MVBB) framework for development of sustainable development indicators (SDIs) for an urban setup. The framework is flexible to be applied to any domain or sector of urban system. In this paper the proposed MVBB...

Measuring the comparative sustainability levels of cities, regions, institutions and projects is an essential procedure in creating sustainable urban futures. This paper introduces a new urban sustainability assessment model: “The Sustainable Infrastructure, Land-use, Environment and Transport...

Various assessment tools are available to assist designers, developers and regulatory bodies to reduce the negative impacts of contemporary multi-housing subdivision projects in industrialized countries. These tools vary considerably in what and how they measure and how the measurement results...

This paper focuses on the sustainability assessment of urban communities through multi-criterion rating systems. Recent interpretations of the concepts of sustainability, assessment and community are discussed before reviewing existing assessment systems. In particular, the systems BREEAM for...

Many cities across the United States have embraced programs aimed at achieving greater sustainability. This may seem surprising, particularly since adopting aggressive environmental protection programs is regarded by some as inimical to economic development. An alternative perspective is that in...