Since the start of the 21st century, humanity has been a predominantly urban species. This Special Issue is about the future of cities and how urbanization will develop when based on principles of sustainability. It explores the underlying dimensions of the transformation of existing cities and the design of low carbon green precincts and their urban systems. The view of the papers presented in...

China is undergoing a rapid transformation from a rural, peasant based society into an urban one. This radical change has had a profound effect on the Chinese population due to advancement through job opportunities and new modes of consumption, contributing to a huge spatial shift of population from countryside to city. This effect on China’s urban growth has resulted in a rise in the middle cl...

This article defines the key parameters of ‘state entrepreneurialism’ as a governance form that combines planning centrality and market instruments, and interprets how these two seemingly contradictory tendencies are made coherent in the political economic structures of post-reform China. Through examining urban regeneration programmes (in particular ‘three olds regeneration’, sanjiu gaizao), t...

Urban heating and the formation of the urban heat island (UHI) is one attribute of urban land transformation that is of interest across science disciplines because the UHI signal reflects a broad suite of important land surface changes impacting human health, ecosystem function, local weather and possibly climate. In this paper we use a combination of satellite and ecological map data to charac...

The Land Transformation Model (LTM), which has been developed to forecast urban-use changes in a grid-based geographical information system, was used to explore the consequences of future urban changes to the years 2020 and 2040 using non-urban sprawl and urban-sprawl trends. The model was executed over a large area containing nine of the major coastal watersheds of eastern Lake Michigan. We fo...

Over the past year or so, I have expanded my work in both areas of my current research. I have explored deeper the interaction between information technology and society, some outcomes of which have recently been published on the internet (Castells 2001). I have also continued my analysis of spatial transformation through an interdisciplinary approach to the problems of cities and regions. This...

The large spreading of e-democracy and e-participatory tools and environments showed, and is still showing, that technologies offer new direction for dealing with the challenge of scaling the deliberative democracy perspective up to the urban governance scale [24] [37]. The recent growth of Urban Living Labs and Human Smart City initiatives is disclosing a promising bridge between the micro-sca...

Transformation of land use-land cover change occurs due to the numbers and activities of people. Urban growth modeling has attracted authentic attention because it helps to comprehend the mechanisms of land use change and thus helps relevant policies made. This study applied logistic regression to model urban growth in the Ahvaz Metropolitan Area of Khuzestan province in IDRISI Selva software a...