Green certification rating systems have been developed for building construction and renovation of an existing building from 1990s by international building assessment tools such as LEED, BREEAM and DGNB. Green certification rating systems for buildings have been upgraded and recently adapted to the urban design and planning. LEED Neighborhood Development, BREEAM Communities, and DGNB Urban Districts are examples of green certification rating system implemented respectively in USA, UK and Germany. As the notion of green urban design gains more significance, city governments have started to set its own green standards in urban design guidelines, based upon studies of green certification rating systems. Recently various issues on materials and resources such as material selection, material recycling, and resource protection are recognized in urban design principles as well as building designs, with a strong relation to other environmental problems. This paper focuses on comparative analysis of how material criteria are embedded for sustainable urban design in LEED ND, BREEAM Communities and DGNB-UD with urban design guidelines recently developed and issued for multiple cities worldwide including cities in Korea. The paper examines differences of material assessment criteria, evaluation parameters and methods, descriptions in green certification rating systems and urban design guidelines. In the analysis, materials are categorized into: (1) building materials (2) infrastructure materials (3) landscape materials, and management of different categories is assessed in existing urban planning and design procedures and practices. In conclusion, overview of material criteria is discussed to discover limits and possibilities of material assessment in sustainable neighborhood development.

As a self-proclaimed 'IT Power Nation', Korea has incorporated information technology at the core of its vision for future development. Already, "ubiquitous eco-cities", most notably Songdo and Sejong City, have been master-planned by the Korean national government and are well under construction as sustainable smart cities of the future. These u-cities are defined as intelligent eco-friendly cities using advanced technologies to enhance the citizens' quality of life and city competitiveness. At the municipal level, Seoul, Korea's capital of more than 600 years of history, has adopted 'Smart Seoul' as a slogan since 2011. Interestingly, however, Seoul's mayor emphasizes communication and sharing as major aspects characterizing a smart city. In view of these different approaches, it is pertinent to question the definitions for these u-cities/smart cities and to examine the extent of their commonality as shown in relevant government initiatives and statements. The aim of this paper is to shed light on what is meant to be a smart and green city by critically examining the underlying premises from varying government perspectives. Using Songdo, Sejong City and Seoul as three case studies, the paper focuses, firstly, on the nexus of u-city and smart city definitions, and, secondly, highlights the differing government discourses imbedded in their social, economic and environmental policies. Ultimately, the paper calls for a more integrated understanding and vision in government discourses regarding the smart city.

Since 2004, the 'Local Government Modernization Agenda' has promoted the concept of community action in UK, therefore, local power become increasingly important in decision-making and policy-delivery. Similarly, implementation of political and economic reforms from 2013 can be understood as a prelude to social reform pursued by the new leaders of China's government. Automatically, urban-rural integrated plan is highly expected to relieve or resolve urban-rural issues especially local conflicts under the background of 'New Normal'.This article tries to make a brief summary of the background, concept, decision-making and action mechanism of community action plan in UK, using 16 cases from England, Wales and Scotland, and brings in a comparison with urban-rural integrated plans from local governments in China. It considers that we are facing the same challenges of economic and environmental globalization. Therefore, with the core issues of interest reallocation, community action becomes a key to urban-rural sustainable development. However, due to the bureaucratic inertia of planning, top-down perspective and lack of partnership, blueprint plan restricts the sustainable goals achievement in China.Furthermore, this article makes suggestions for local urban-rural integrated plan in China. Bottom-up empowerment: arousing common goals from local environmental, economic, social concerns to enhance community social capital. Local partnership: cooperating with community-based power, especially remaining collective organizations in the suburban districts or villages, to form grassroots-led decision-making platform including government and other stakeholders. Sustainable action: turning integrated plans from blueprint plan to action plan with clear goals, participations and monitoring indicators to keep them lasting and effective.

Resilient Urbanism is a broad concept that seeks to explore a wide spectrum of topics related to what makes resilience in urban contexts unique: spatial challenges, social and economic equity, climate change, density, mobility, governance, and other characteristics related to the unpredictable and ever-changing urban environment. It proposes a vision of Urban Planning and Urban Design as responsive - and therefore implicitly 'smart'- to the volatile contexts of contemporary cities and regions through a variety of scales and time frames. However, in order to make our cities truly intelligent, we need to re-frame the theoretical notion of 'resilience' in terms of concretely 'smart' planning and design actions for specific context. As Jane Jacobs argued back in the 1960's, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently confirmed (The Black Swan, 2007), the traditional top-down model of Urban Planning is essentially broken, noticeably vulnerable and unable of learning from its mistakes. The case of generic New Towns development in South-East Asia painfully illustrates such fragility. By presenting the case of Nam An Khanh - a typical example of a purely profit-driven New Town development in Hanoi (Vietnam)- this paper discusses the hypothesis that a more incremental and more flexible planning strategy is necessary as an alternative system for resilient urban development, in order to deal with the volatile nature of the economic and social resurrection of Vietnam. This involves a strategy that fosters socio-spatial integration and local economic growth and enables real users to be active stakeholders in this process, by engaging them in co-development of their city. It involves a different kind of Urban Design and Urban Planning, which is less about designing or planning the product, but more about designing the most resilient possible process, a design for self-organization within an official planning framework.

The resource-based city shows a gradually decline behind the external prosperity in China. It has been identified that there were 262 resource-based cities in China . According to the different stages of developmentthe, the resource-based cities were divided into four types: growing, maturing, exhausting and renewing. Currently, 23 of them which have entered the exhausted post-transition phase of resource were called renewing cities. Thus, the focus of this paper is on the smart growth of renewing cities, whose core elements can be extracted from the essential characteristics showed in the process. Based on the thought of “smart growth” and aspects of “moderate exploitation”, “green ecology” and “social comfort”, the analytic framework of "smart growth", with 9 goals and 40 sets of variables relationships established, is formed. According to the statistical description and analysis of the existing data, in 40 sets of variables, there are 22 sets in line with the "smart growth" requirements; while 15 sets not ; and another 3 sets can not be judged. Finally, based on the results of the analysis, the path of “smart growth” for renewing city can be explained from aspects of city infrastructure supply, land development and utilization, energy saving and emission reduction, environmental protection and city agglomeration promotion, which are the key ares that government should focus on as well.

Under a tight global economic working structure, it is hard to avoid centers and boundaries territorially and produce uneven dependent relationships between countries and places. Zoning regulations in modern cities often conjest many unusable segmental spaces and scatter across landscapes. In Taiwan, the dwellers would often use these spaces to recreate, they might be vegetable gardens, toolsheds and informal trading stands, and these behaviors is often acceptable by city council. Paracity is to take these phenomenon and response to another level. The sandbank between Taipei and New Taipei City has been in use and 'own' by roughly 20 people. Due to the rainy season in summer, the sandbank would disappear about 30 days, and therefore is not guided by urban zoning regulations. The project of Paracity is to build on such place and reuse waste of two cities for its water supplies and materials.   The agitated space remains after modernization, is Paracity would response. It attempted to bring them into a transformation, a statement of archaeology of knowledge. A series of paradox of urban development striated with many ruins, became a readable stratum of multiplicity. Here, Paracity is standing on a reterritorialization position, it is a Deleuze's Abstract machine of ideational event, turned to a living derivation of two-folds. Similarly, by Casagrande, these are 'pressure points' of living organism, the urban acupuncture is to serve these space and revitalized in all system. Paracity is a 'knowledge building', crisscross space point of unconscious of chaos, a virtual regime of signs as a regeneration of natural spaces to a natural organism. Paracity bifurcates genetic power on a knowledge building of assemblage of monads, engender of other dimension to deterritoralization.  This paper is focus on Casagrande Laboratory's latest design on 3rd generation city, as a vision of bigger scale compare to previous works. The design is the result of many researches of unique characteristics of Tamsui River which divided Taipei and New Taipei City. It further elaborates expansion of urban boundaries by Nomadology theory. It is the architecture without metaphor, an architecture representation of postindustrial era.

Future cities will have to confront limited urban spaces and resources, undertake the preservation or conservation of sense of place, and continuously improve the existing urban environment. Accordingly, urban void spaces are likely to become key strategic places for ‘Green Urban Development’. Urban voids are spaces that are useless, underused, abandoned, or in-between spaces among public and private realms. This research looks into urban voids that can be found especially within the residential environment in Seoul, as a chance for sustainable urban design. Dispersed urban voids have been generated due to various reasons, such as intrinsic to policy and planning system, changing economic, social and functional aspect and further on. The study briefly evaluates the existing built environment especially the quality of urban spatial structure and public spaces in the residential area, which is made up of individual buildings. Existing urban voids are extracted, identified and then classified into three major categories- plot, block, and street condition. A crucial aspect would be showing how these urban voids could be used or reused in terms of ‘green urban development’, which should consider not only the importance of preservation, but also balancing with new developments. Conventional low-level technology which involves planting and greening and environmental high technology which includes fuel cell, electric car station, rainwater storage and so on can be potentially applied and integrated into these urban voids. Consequently this research paper will suggest that each improvement measure should be considered as a piecemeal ‘act’ of an integrated urban regeneration and transformation of a whole city with adequate development guidelines.

The complex urban environment has multiple levels of design and planning that are applied in the form of urban blocks, layouts and patterns of the city. The main aim of this research paper is to develop a comparative analytical study based on the study of urban blocks in several dense urban environments of a large city in China. This study will explore the issues of green infrastructure, urban environmental performance and urban patterns as the three main elements of the analysis. The city of Ningbo, located at the Eastern coast of China, is selected as the core case study. The findings of the study will enable the urban planners and designers to identify refining methods to [better] optimise urban blocks, layouts and patterns of the cities.  This study will emphasise on the relations between green infrastructure and urban environmental performance of the selected case studies.

As a result of a funding proposal for an international development and academic exchange program, a joint urban planning and design studio was initiated in 2014 between Seoul National University and Diponegoro University from Indonesia. The studio's objectives were to expose students to the urban planning issues of dealing with environmental hazards - the constant threat of a volcanic eruption - in a relatively remote rural area in Central Java Indonesia, challenging and enhancing individual students' problem-defining and problem-solving skills. Faculty members and graduate level students from both institutions participated in the studio whereby intense group collaborations, site survey and fieldtrips were conducted. Through this experience, students utilized local knowledge in introducing community-specific risk responsive measures whilst overcoming the problems of unfamiliarity through constructive intercultural collaborations. In this paper, the process of the studio development is discussed in respect to the pedagogical values of studio-based education, and design proposals for two neighborhoods are described which highlights the possibility of living in harmony with disaster through various social and physical interventions. In conclusion, the results of the studio are discussed in terms recognizing environmental hazard as a vehicle for understanding local perceptions, the advantages of designing through the use of local knowledge, and the need for a holistic approach in urban planning and design.

Urban landscape of Chinese cities has experienced tremendous changes over the past one hundred years. China embraced modern technology along with modern architectural and urban design system from the western world. The expense of excessive urbanization is environment degradation and lost of the identities of the old cities. All this forced us to reflect our choices of urban design, was it right to reject all the old concepts from the past? Chinese is one of the few ancient continuous civilizations. As a consequence, it is able to drawn lessons from a very long historical evolution. It can be observed that the civilization center shifted several times in Chinese primitive society; and each time the shifts followed an environmental collapse at the former site. The disapproval of large-scare constructions could be found in the oldest texts in Chinese culture. Confucian philosophy, which became the dominate philosophy of Chinese society, have adopted those values and generated it into the concept of promoting modesty living style. This eventually lead to a more resilient and sustainable society in old China.My hypothesis is that Confucian ideal of modesty and humbleness was an essential element for keeping sustainability of the society. I am arguing that, the Confucian impacts on urban design in old China such as restriction of large-scale constructions and depressing of development of high level architectures, acted as a safety valve to avoid extreme environmental and social collapse. My proposal is that the examination of how Confucian values influenced architecture and urban design in different periods of Chinese history could be helpful to understand the profound effects of philosophical concepts on the social choices of urbanization.