Undoubtedly, public spaces can be considered as an essential factor, which could contribute to urban arrangement, create and maintain a strong local center and enhance the quality of superior environment and the sense of citizenship. Moreover, integrity has always been the most basic structural qualities and one of the key principles of cities. Integrated urban spaces exhibit the integrated str...

Planning and Design in Urban Development, consuming large Resources entailing many variables giving numerous solutions with large variations in resource-efficiency indicators, is a problem-solving process (Mitchell WJ. Computer-aided architectural design. New York: Petrocelli/Charter; 1977) involving search through numerous potential solutions to select a particular solution that meets a specif...

Sustainable urban water management (SUWM) requires an integrated, adaptive, coordinated and participatory approach. Current urban water policies are beginning to reflect this understanding yet the rhetoric is often not translated to implementation. Despite the 'new' philosophy, urban water management remains a complex and fragmented area relying on traditional, technical, linear management appr...

A modeling study using hourly meteorological and pollution concentration data from across the coterminous United States demonstrates that urban trees remove large amounts of air pollution that consequently improve urban air quality. Pollution removal (O3, PM10, NO2, SO2, CO) varied among cities with total annual air pollution removal by US urban trees estimated at 711,000 metric tons ($3.8 bill...

1. The world’s population is increasingly urban, and streams and rivers, as the low lying points of the landscape, are especially sensitive to and profoundly impacted by the changes associated with urbanization and suburbanization of catchments. 2. River restoration is an increasingly popular management strategy for improving the physical and ecological conditions of degraded urban streams. In ...

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...