Cities have emerged as important actors in climate change policy, implementing measures to reduce emissions from transportation, buildings and waste. More recently, states such as California have implemented cap-and-trade programs to control greenhouse gases. However, a state-level cap handcuffs cities: by fixing emissions at the level of the cap, it precludes local governments from further red...

There has been a growing debate in recent decades about the range and substance of urban theory. The debate has been marked by many different claims about the nature of cities, including declarations that the urban is an incoherent concept, that urban society is nothing less than modern society as a whole, that the urban scale can no longer be separated from the global scale, and that urban the...

This paper reviews worldwide activities on regional information spaces. In the US and Canada, a large number of community networks appeared in the early 1990s. As a platform for community networks, information spaces using the city metaphor are being developed worldwide. In Europe, more than one hundred digital cities have been tried. Asian countries are actively adopting the latest information...

Globalization and transport revolution, logistics integration, and the consequent expansion of port area and hinterland in the maritime industry have redefined the functional role of ports in supply chains and have generated a new pattern of freight distribution. This phenomenon again requires a new approach towards port development and related urban planning. Such changes have inevitably influ...

The paper uses an introduction to the comparative study of Japanese and Chinese cities to make a case for a regional approach to thinking about cities in East Asia. In so doing it argues for contextually sensitive comparative urbanism as a platform for a broader understanding of trends towards global convergence. It outlines three different types of comparative urbanism and sets out a basic fra...

The environmental health field has been swept by major changes in recent years. One was the rediscovery of the " built environment " as a key determinant of human health. Community design—including land use and transportation decisions, but extending to such arenas as energy, housing, and food—affects outcomes as diverse as cardiovascular health, respiratory heath, cancer, injury risk, and soci...

The construction and service of urban infrastructure systems and buildings involves immense resource consumption. Cities are responsible for the largest component of global energy, water, and food consumption as well as related sewage and organic waste production. Due to ongoing global urbanization, in which the largest sector of the global population lives in cities which are already built, gl...

Economic theories of systems of cities explain why production and consumption activities are concentrated in a number of urban areas of different sizes and industrial composition rather than uniformly distributed in space. These theories have been successively influenced by four paradigms: i) conventional urban economics emphasizing the tension between economies due to the spatial concentration...

Economic theories of systems of cities explain why production and consumption activities are concentrated in a number of urban areas of different sizes and industrial composition rather than uniformly distributed in space. These theories have been successively influenced by four paradigms: i) conventional urban economics emphasizing the tension between economies due to the spatial concentration...