A book will be published with Springer.

Spatial planning and sustainable development

—How to achieve a sustainable urban form in Asian cities?

Editorial introduction

Researchers across the world are concerned with sustainable urban forms, and this field is particularly significant for policy planners aiming for compact cities or sustainable and smart growth. This book investigates policy impact on sustainable urban forms through spatial planning implementation, which has been examined by analyzing Asian planning experiences from a multidisciplinary viewpoint involving different professional planning.

Sustainable urban form represents objectives of spatial planning and relevant policies. Compact city, as the concept of a sustainable urban form with high density of urban settlements, revitalized city central areas, and mixed land uses has been widely accepted in Europe, North America, and Asia. Urban form is a result of interactions between stakeholders under spatial planning and relevant planning policies of economic, social and ecological aspects within an urban or regional area. Basically, private investments are always competitively looking for low cost and high profit, thus land demand of private sectors such as industries, shopping malls and housing development projects tend to be located at urban hinge and hereby result to urban sprawl. In this book, authors argue that sustainable urban form is possible under effective urban policies in the process of spatial planning implementation. In another word, effective planning controls on development demand pattern, ecological network, and transportation and land use patterns are necessary.

We will summarize the key contributions of the book regarding the role of public actors on implementation of spatial planning. In the meantime, we will introduce how each chapter will contribute to the book's main conclusions.

For organizing chapters of this book, we examined planning experiences from a comparison viewpoint of urban decline and urban growth. The planning experiences of developed and developing countries in the Asian cities are respectively chosen to support this comparison. Although many efforts of planning policies regarding compact city have being carried out by local governments in some developed Asian cities of Japan and South Korea currently, pursuit of high profit in urban hinge has substantially influenced on city form. In order to find a sustainable urban form in the developing period, many developing Asian cities nowadays are learning from the experiences in European countries. However, most of cities in the developing Asian cities, such as the cities in China still paid more attention to economic development and physical planning, following the history of urban sprawl in European, US or Asian developed cities. Therefore, conflicts are emerging between economic extension and compact urban area in most Asian cities. In such situations we believe that effective planning policies are necessary for reaching a sustainable urban form.

A special Issue will be pulished with Inderscience

Special Issue on: “Spatial Planning and Historical city"

International Journal of Sustainable Society (IJSSoc)

Destruction of historical landscape and culture during rapid economic development is reaching worrying proportions in many Asian areas, where new urban redevelopment projects are implemented in urban downtown areas. A lesson gained from the urban development experience is that the aspect of urban conservation is a strategic opportunity for sustainable society, in a sense that it could be easier to gather all stakeholders concerned with community suitability in historic preservation areas since historical and cultural landscape are limited. In addition, the unbalance between the protection and development in historical cities awakes stakeholders when traditional communities are disappearing gradually. Urban conservation is a strategy for urban regeneration and community development in historic preservation areas.

This special issue focuses on spatial planning and historical conservation issues in Asian areas. The objective is to provide an insight on the experiences of planning policy and implementation for urban conservation from viewpoints of sustainable society.

Subject Coverage

Spatial planning and historical areas

Urbanization and historical landscape

Historical values and sustainable society

A special issue will be published with Inderscience

Special Issue on: “Geoinformation and Spatial Planning"

International Journal of Society System Science (IJSSS)

The urban modeling work, which integrates constrained economic demand, land use development, transportation and environmental issues, is able to describe potential spatial urban growth processes. Using urban model, the spatial planning work proposed by local urban planning, land management, and environmental protection departments can be combined in the same platform to visualize possible spatial patterns of urban growth. We attempt to provide an insight on urban models to integrate spatial planning with different aspects of urban and social system in order to study the dynamic, interactive influences between different departments in local government such as economic, land use, transportation and environment.

In this issue, we have focused on how to apply urban models to aid local governments in investigating growth possibilities through urban modeling in planning practice rather than in model building and validation.

Subject Coverage

Urban modeling for spatial planning including the following aspects:

Nature resource and economic development

Transportation and land use

Landscape and spatial information

Environmental issue and disaster