MACMILLAN Remaking Sustainable Urbanism: Space, Scale and Governance in the New Urban Era

This book analyses the implications of eco-urbanism re-making for policy and practice under the transformational trends of economic decentralization and market reform in China. While the guiding themes are space, scale, and governance of cities, the book focuses on three interrelated prevailing processes of local green space reproduction, cross-scale mediation of eco-city planning ideology and mobilized social-economic-political intricacies among different countries. This book addresses the ongoing global diffusion and diversification of sustainable urbanism discourses, debates and practices to portray, evaluate, remake and implement a sustainable form of urban development, using China as a national example. As eco-city practice becomes a city-branding instrument worldwide, this new urban development vision is also well embraced by Chinese local governments. In these contexts, the Chinese government has initiated and endorsed a number of massive projects to promote green urbanism, steering urbanization onto a more sustainable trajectory. The construction of these “ecotopias” involves a multitude of processes ranging from policy transfer/mobility to institutional design, from innovation in green technologies to the promotion of green buildings, and from policy implementation to public participation. From the Back Cover This book analyses the implications of eco-urbanism re-making for policy and practice under the transformational trends of economic decentralization and market reform in China. While the guiding themes are space, scale, and governance of cities, the book focuses on three interrelated prevailing processes of local green space reproduction, cross-scale mediation of eco-city planning ideology and mobilized social-economic-political intricacies among different countries. This book addresses the ongoing global diffusion and diversification of sustainable urbanism discourses, debates and practices to portray, evaluate, remake and implement a sustainable form of urban development, using China as a national example. As eco-city practice becomes a city-branding instrument worldwide, this new urban development vision is also well embraced by Chinese local governments. In these contexts, the Chinese government has initiated and endorsed a number of massive projects to promote green urbanism, steering urbanization onto a more sustainable trajectory. The construction of these “ecotopias” involves a multitude of processes ranging from policy transfer/mobility to institutional design, from innovation in green technologies to the promotion of green buildings, and from policy implementation to public participation. About the Author Dr. Xiaoling Zhang joined City University of Hong Kong in the winter of 2012 following prior academic roles at the University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She has written widely on sustainable urbanization and urban redevelopment in China, speculative real estate developers, land use planning/policy and gentrification. She has also engaged in environmental studies, particularly in developers’ behaviour/actions in contributing to social responsibility/sustainable development, energy policy and renewable and sustainable energy use in the built environment. She organized a session on “Social-environmental justice and sustainability” at the prestigious 2015 Association of American Geographers Conference at Chicago, and another session at the 2016 Association of American Geographers Conference at San Francisco titled “Urban inequality and unjust sustainability in China”. She won the Outstanding Paper Award Winner at the Literati Network Awards for Excellence in 2011. She has published over 100 papers in leading peer-reviewed international academic journals, including 40 SSCI/SCI journal papers for Land Use Policy, Urban Studies, Cities, Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, etc. Dr. Zhang also serves on the editoria