LEED Neighborhood Development (ND) is a sustainable certification rating system for a smart green neighborhood development conceived by the USA. Similarly, DGNB Urban Districts (UD) is a smart green certification rating system conceived by Germany. LEED-ND has set a standard for the smart green urban practices particularly in the USA and DGNB-UD has set a standard for the smart green practices particularly in Germany. However both sustainable district certification systems are applied also internationally to a growing extent. The comparative analysis in the LEED-ND and DGNB-UD identifies both common and different elements of the two smart green planning standards. This paper aims to analyze pros and cons of both LEED and DGNB district rating systems. The paper analyzes the credit categories, criteria, their weighting and overall method and process of each system, thereby articulating significance of each certification system. The paper discusses potential role of the rating methodology, process and country-specific aspects. In addition, the paper also addresses the potential role of both systems to function as a planning help for the design, realization, operation and maintenance of smart and green urban districts, and for the achievement of excellent rankings. Both rating systems address certification and rating criteria comprehensively from the very beginning in the design and planning processes. The comparative analysis of LEED-ND and DGNB-UD will highlight common and different elements of both smart green urban district certification rating systems.

Previous studies suggested that, the Fortune Global 500 is an important factor to judge whether a city has the characteristic of a world city. It is a common view that, as the number of Fortune Global 500 companies headquartered in Beijing has increased, it has been getting closer to the goal to become a world city. Based on this point, this paper discusses the green challenges Beijing is facing heading towards a world city, using the methods of comparative research and qualitative research. Challenge 1: Green business, the proportion of resources-based enterprises is too high. Challenge 2: Regional green economy, the unreasonable regional division failed to form the industrial chain. Challenge 3: Green space, the urban space is not of high quality.

The main findings of this research are: Among the Fortune 500 companies located in Beijing, 51 are state-owned monopolistic businesses. About half of the output value is produced by resource-based enterprises. From the regional perspective, the industrial division system is not clear, compared with other World Cities like Newyork and Tokyo. Most of the Fortune 500 companies located on the outskirts of Beijing are dependent on local mineral resources. And the pollutants released by these resource-based enterprises are commonly considered as the main source of Beijing's air pollution. A regional green environment is the fundamental condition for improving the urban environmental quality. And the high quality urban space is one of the key factors attracting talent and advanced producer services.

In order to grow into a world city, three suggestions are proposed in this paper for Beijing. Firstly, shifting from city scale expansion to urban quality improvement. Secondly, promoting green industry and fostering advanced producer services to enhance its impact and influence in global economies. Thirdly, increasing financial input on infrastructure construction and regeneration oriented sustainable development.

While there is an international trend to develop zero or near zero emissions building solutions by 2020, and there are also countless studies on how to optimize building envelope and energy systems to achieve it during the building useful life, few studies take into consideration the enormous impact of the emissions resulting from the urbanization and construction activities, previous to the building use. This research studies in detail the whole emissions balance (and how they can be related or not to the energy efficiency) in a real project of newly built residential clusters in Mancha Real (Jaén, Spain), and the influence resulting from the choice of the different urban typologies. For comparison, single family row houses and low density four floor multi family housing alternatives have been studied, as they are among most popular housing solutions in Spain. The detailed life-cycle analysis, energy efficiency and emissions have been calculated with the help of a sophisticated and popular commercial software (CYPE). Also the research has been done under the current emissions and energy regulations in Spain, all under the EC general policy framework. Even though the local and very specific character of this study, the methodology can be applied to any other typology and geographical area. After careful choice of building and systems alternatives and their comparison, the study concludes that the major emissions impact and energy cost of the urbanization and building activity occurs during the construction, while the later savings due to the reductions of the building use emissions are very modest in comparison. Therefore, more study is suggested to improve the efficiency in the urban design and typological solutions, and in the construction process itself, for a really reduced emission footprint of the built environment.

Global warming and the energy crisis have recently gained growing concern. Urban researchers increasingly focus studies on energy-efficient cities from varying perspectives, especially the urban form's perspective, to gain insight and improve efficiency contributions in overall design components. As micro-level studies taking family or individual as research unit have yielded abundant accomplishments, relatively the much fewer macro-level studies taking cities as research unit have mainly focused on urban scale and density's impact on energy consumption. The relationship between energy consumption and urban spatial structure, such as centrality of facilities, mixing degree of landuse and distribution of block areas, is still lack of proof from empirical research since gathering macro-level urban spatial data is much more difficult than micro-level study. Contributed to the supplement of these empirical proof, this article first makes systemic quantitative expression of urban spatial structure of 30 provincial capital cities in China using the method of Kernel density analyses and landscape index analyses with the data from OpenstreetMap and other online maps, followed by analyses of the relationship between household transportation energy consumption (HTEC) and urban spatial structure. Some findings and suggestions are given: ① From centrality perspective, debate between monocentric form and polycentric form doesn't take up the vital point, a certain center in the urban space hierarchy system should cover proportional built-up area. When an employment center covers about 140 km2 built-up area, a shopping center covers about 45 km2 built-up area and a residential patch covers no more than 1.2 km2, HTEC is the lowest in our study. ② From the perspective of mixing degree of landuse, different from the common sense that the higher mixing degree the better, the average landuse patch area and HTEC are well fitted with a conic curve, meaning that a city whose average landuse patch area is about 5 hectares has the lowest HTEC. ③ From the perspective of distribution of block area, cities with higher proportion of small blocks tend to have lower HTEC.

Greenway as landscaped, linear and multi-purpose component of urban planning has been increasingly used globally, especially in cities experiencing de-industrialization process. It has the potential to restructure city regions, improve spatial quality of places, and at the same time, make them greener and friendlier to pedestrians and cyclists. For creating green cities, there is no doubt that greenway could be seen as a tool of urban planning and design. However, without considering the specific demands of people who are the daily users of these greenways, this tool might not lead to truly green cities that people living in it appreciate. This paper is proposing a people-centered approach for the planning and design of greenway systems, with the aim of transforming industrial areas into livable cities, by reducing the level of pollution and energy consumption, while at the same time, facilitating the creation of citizenship for migrant workers. The context of this paper is Shenzhen (China), known as the 'world factory', which is currently in the transitional period towards becoming a 'world city'. Due to the increasing labour cost, manufactory industries are now gradually moving out of Shenzhen, from industrial districts like Dalang. Unlike the urban districts located inside the special economic zone of Shenzhen that were planned and developed officially since 1980s, Dalang represents those industrial districts located in the peri-urban area of Shenzhen, formed in the rural industrialization process in the past three decades, with mainly spontaneous development led by village collectives. The socio-spatial consequence of such development is a densely built-up urban area with productivity but lacking urbanity, accumulating a population of which 90% is young migrant workers working on the production lines. This paper will examine the daily lives of young migrant workers, their current and future demands on urban public space, cultural facilities and mobility. The results will be used as input for creating an innovative design approach to integrated greenway systems so that urban ecology, urban amenity and social equity could be gradually built up simultaneously.

During China’s rapid urbanization, its megacities are facing the greatest challenge of urban growth control of both population and built-up area. As one of the most important measures of urban containment, Green Belt has been widely used worldwide for many years. Beijing’s Green Belts have been in their implementation for nearly three decades, during which different implementation modes were used. The article looks into the evolution of Beijing’s Green Belts policies and the existing implementation modes, in which, the government, rural collectives and property developers cooperate in different ways. The aim of the article is to provide China’s megacities with experience and lessons of urban containment policy implementation. In-depth interview, fieldwork, document research, remote sensing and GIS analysis are used for summarizing the detailed processes of different implementation modes, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. The four modes involved include ‘government direct participation – property developer nonintervention’, ‘government direct participation – property developer intervention’, ‘government nonparticipation – property developer intervention’ and ‘government indirect participation – property developer intervention’. Typical areas in the unit of township are selected to analyze and compare the effectiveness of Green Belts policy under different implementation modes. The conclusion is that the implementation mode of ‘government direct participation - property developer nonintervention’ results in the greatest effectiveness of physical environmental plan implementation, but requires large amounts of financial expenditure, and thus cannot be widely used. The mode of ‘government nonparticipation – property developer intervention’ suits market-oriented economy best, and thus is most widely used, but it has also left many unsolved problems caused by market failure such as capital chain rupture. Suggestions for policy improvement lie in how to guide these four modes respectively to achieve the multiple goals more effectively during Beijing’s Green Belts implementation.

A smart city is a city capable of adjusting its sizes, structures and shapes. Nature gives us the information how this could be achieved. The 'Software' of the city (green, water, food, sustainability, social constructs) is obstructed by the 'Hardware' (infrastructure, roads, sewage, buildings, economics). This makes it hard to create space for Climate Impacts and Urban Agriculture as their requirements are uncertain, temporary, change seasonally, occur suddenly and change over longer periods and street patterns, main structures and buildings are usually immovable. This hardware dominance often leads to a downturn also (Detroit, Chicago, Eastern Germany, Liverpool, e.a.). Thus, becoming smart by nature, eg let the rules of nature guide us in city planning, could improve the adjustability of the city and allow spaces to shrink and grow, depending the needs at times. Nature's principles function as ultimate smart design principles. For the city, as a complex adaptive system lessons can be learnt from Swarm behaviour. The reason to develop the Swarm Planning concept, able to develop smart city designs adjustable to uncertain future claims, helping to create flexible spaces with more room when required for the software of the city: Smart Green Urbanism. The paper will describe, compare and discuss six case studies in which the Swarm Planning concept is applied to provide more space and flexibility for climate impacts and urban agriculture. The way nodes and networks, determine the way unplanned (often unused) spaces are occupied), structures and systems are formed, hubs, exchange and intense connections lead to emergent occupation patterns, provide the space to accommodate climate impacts and the growth of food and impact on the city designs. The findings of these six studies are subsequently used to develop an autarkic design for a climate proof, fish-based food system in the Netherlands

Increased surface runoff generated in urban areas due to larger proportion of impervious surfaces has, in many cases, exceeded the capacity of urban drainage systems. In response to such challenge, this paper introduces the quantitative analysis of pluvial flood alleviation by open surface water systems in the case of Almere in the Netherlands and compares it with Tianjin Eco-city in China, with the aim of optimising land use planning and urban design for new urban districts. The methodology is a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis. With the analytical tool of ArcGIS, the authors have investigated the influence of spatial distribution of surface water system on the reduction of pluvial flood risks. The conclusions include some preliminary principles: (1) a densely distributed surface water network is preferable; (2) areas farther away from water body require water sensitive spatial intervention; (3) optimizing the allocation of different types of ground surface could contribute to pluvial flood alleviation. An alternative design proposal for a typical urban block in Tianjin Eco-city has been put forward to illustrate these principles.

A variety of computer-based simulation programs to calculate the energetic behaviour of houses and the use of renewable energies are available. However, these are developed for the detailed design of building physics or engineering design of heating- and solar systems. In many cases, these programs require detailed knowledge and licenses are expensive. A zero or plus energy house in many cases, is a continuation of the Passive House. For this purpose, space and resources need to be provided and the building structure needs to be adjusted. These considerations have to be taken into account early in the building design. The aim of this current study was to develop a concept for an Energy Toolbox. It aims to be a widely-accessible easy-to-use tool to designing Zero Emission Buildings (ZEB) and is based on Microsoft Excel. The building structure design is introduced in the first part of the Energy Toolbox and takes common basic elements in building physics into account. This part determines energy demand for heating and cooling and meets Passive House criteria. In addition, the electrical demand for light and facilities is evaluated in this first part. Climatic parameters are taken into account for calculations of heat transfer coefficient, heat gains and ventilation losses. The calculation tool is designed for three different climates: Sub oceanic cool temperate zone, central Europe, warm temperate sub-tropical zone with Mediterranean wet winters and dry summers, Turkey, and a cold temperate zone with warm, humid summers, South Korea. In those zones, Zurich, Berlin, Istanbul and Seoul have been studied. Necessary climate parameters for solar-radiation, heating and cooling degree days, base temperature and other relevant temperatures for building calculation have been set. Those have a profound influence on the energy needs for heating and cooling. The second part of the Energy Toolbox determines technologies that could be used to cover the energy demand of buildings. These include heat pump systems with different heating and cooling sources (geothermal, outside air and waste water), solar (thermal and photovoltaic) as well as the adiabatic cooling. In addition, technologies and methods that contribute to a reduced energy demand are presented. Green walled buildings, adaptable dynamic lighting and shading devices provide this solution. A possible combination employs three main systems. An air-water heat pump compact system, a brine/ water heat pump system with sewage or geothermal utilization and a solar-thermal system with seasonal storage. All three systems can be supplemented with solar energy and designed in terms of a net zero balance. The energy consumption of the building corresponds to the concept of zero-plus-energy buildings. The second part of the Energy Toolbox is has been described schematically. It is designed such that it can be supplemented with additional technologies in the future.

Public transport plays a critical role in the sustainability of urban settings. The mass mobility and quality of urban lives can be improved by establishing public transport networks that are accessible to pedestrians within a specific walking distance, which would also reduce monetary and environmental costs. Accessibility to public transport is the ease with which inhabitants can reach means of transportation such as buses, trams, metros, and trains. By measuring the degree of accessibility to public transport networks using a common data format, a comparative study can be conducted between competitive cities or metropolitan areas with different public transport systems. The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) by Google Developers allows this by offering a common format for public transportation stops, routes, trips, schedules, and associated geographic information in a series of text files. This paper suggests a method to measure the degree of accessibility to public transit in different urban areas using the GTFS, which is an open-source data set voluntarily produced and shared by the public transit agencies of many participating cities around the world. Functional Urban Area (FUA), which was identified by the OECD in 2013 for global comparative research, was applied as a spatial unit of analysis. Areas a maximum distance of approximately 330m from each bus and tram node, and 660m from each metro and train node, were considered as Service Areas. These Service Areas were then classified into five levels according to operating frequency at each node to assess and compare the degrees of accessibility across FUAs. The analysis was carried out on the route networks of each urban area using ArcGIS 9.3. The results from eight FUAs show that Melbourne and Portland have higher degree of accessibility to public transport.