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Urban land-use planning, particularly in historical and cultural districts, requires an impressive balance among various competing social, economic, and environmental considerations. In cities across China, the challenge lies in reconciling the demands of modern urban growth with the preservation of rich historical legacies. The preservation of historic landmarks meets the demands of an expanding urban area and infrastructure that the city faces. To improve land-use planning efforts in these contexts, this research proposes an approach that leverages multi-objective evolutionary algorithms combined with remote sensing techniques, specifically the Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA2). The research analyses government plans and expert interviews to identify major objectives of urban growth and cultural preservation. To maximize land-use planning, two multi-objective functions are established, one to reduce impacts on historical and cultural areas and the other to optimize the efficiency of urban growth. The findings indicate that this multi-objective optimization technique can significantly support sustainable land-use planning in Chinese cities, ensuring that development requirements are satisfied without sacrificing the integrity of cultural assets using the parameter multi-objective optimization result and Pareto front visualization which considers cultural significance, economic validity, environmental impact, and also using fitness evaluation over generations. These are recommended for Chinese cities that aim to balance growth with historical preservation and use similar approaches.

Urban Transformation refers to the significant change and transition in various urban fields and aspects, which is a comprehensive transformation with multi-field, multi-aspect, multi-level and multi-angle. In the past, China's urban development has mostly been on the road of extensive model, characterized by high growth, high consumption, high emission and high expansion. With this development model, some problems have appeared in the process of China's urban development, such as the disorderly and inefficient development, the imbalanced urban-rural and regional development and the unharmonious social development etc.; obviously, this is not sustainable. At present, Chinese cities are in a new stage of accelerated and overall transformation. It is important to quickly accomplish the economic, social and ecological overall transformation, to establish a new mode of scientific development with low consumption, low emission, high efficiency, and harmonious and orderly development, taking the intensive, innovative, integrated, harmonious, green and characteristic development road.

There is a coupling relationship between the development of urban transportation and cities: Urban growth leads to increase in the demand for urban transportation and consequently, a lot of transportation emissions. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of the mechanism behind the driving effect of urban development on transportation emissions is a crucial prerequisite for coordinated development of low-carbon urban transportation and cities. Based on the oil product allocation method, this paper estimates the transportation emission in Beijing from 1995 to 2016. Then based on the understanding of the driving mechanism, this paper applies the urban allometric scaling law to analyze the relationship between city size and transportation emission. Finally, the driving mechanism is analyzed using the STRIPAT model. The results reveal a superlinear relationship between transportation emission in Beijing and the expansion of the city, as the former outgrew the latter. Population size, urbanization, economic size, industrial structure, spatial scale and infrastructure construction are positive driving factors of transportation emission, whereas progress of energy technologies as a negative driving factor can restrain the growth of transportation emission. Urbanization has the most significant impact on urban transportation emission, and economic size contributes the most to the growth of transportation emission. Based on the results, we make a few policy recommendations for low-carbon urban transportation of Beijing, which include: improving transportation efficiency in the process of urbanization; promoting energy conservation and emission reduction while pursuing economic development so as to decouple transportation emission from urban development; restricting unordered urban expansion and updating the concept of transportation infrastructure supply; and developing energy technologies to improve energy efficiency.

The government’s vision is oriented towards reforming the urban map and increasing the urban communities’ ability to face current and future urban development challenges. However, it is becoming increasingly aware that it cannot achieve this by acting alone. This in turn poses an important question about good urban governance, and appropriate management mechanisms that may enable the achievement of the strategic goals. In this context, the government adopted a “National Housing Strategy”, which aims to transfer the current situation of the housing sector in Egypt and encourage the private sector to provide more diversity of patterns of holdings in this sector. However, to what extent the government can develop this approach into an effective public–private partnership framework that ensures a strong private sector response in the delivery of affordable housing is still unclear. Accordingly, this research aims to develop a conceptual framework to guide decision-makers on how the state can apply urban development partnership as an integrated approach to better development of affordable housing in Egypt.

This study examined the effect of water conservation projects on the economic and ecological development of a city from the perspective of different stakeholders. We used Xiling Gorge as a case study and recruited people in Yichang as the study respondents. The study was conducted using a mixed research method. Samples were collected and analyzed through fieldwork, a questionnaire survey, and structured interviews using intentional sampling and snowball sampling. The study revealed that modern water conservation projects could improve convenience by stabilizing water sources, increasing the government’s willingness to invest, and improving public infrastructure and transportation facilities. The projects can also lead to developing special products, creating business opportunities, raising awareness, and attracting young people to return to their hometowns. However, industries and projects cannot be differentiated because of the lack of funds for urban development, lack of necessary considerations in decision-making, and lack of entrepreneurial skills among the public. Additionally, population aging could lead to a labor shortage, which may prevent tourism areas from improving the quality of services and meeting the needs of tourists. Consequently, the perceptions of residents and tourists on the current state of economic, social, environmental, and ecological development in the village diverge.

This paper explains the potential implications of digital interventions for social accountability through the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) in India. The SCM represents India’s transition to a new political economy based on rapid urbanization and wide-scale application of digital technology to reform public service delivery while simultaneously creating new markets for urban transformation. Within this wider context, the paper considers the future of democratic practices in urban governance. We argue that while citizen-led accountability practices were trialed by civil society organizations since 1990s, the SCM presented unique opportunity and challenge to institutionalize these tools within the framework of multi-scalar governance — between central-, state- and local-level institutions and between communities, private vendors and public bodies. Zooming into the four smart city projects — Indore, Kakinada, Panaji and Ranchi — we explain how each city engaged with citizen groups, communities and civil society and what their experiences tell us about the prospects and challenges of democratizing digital urban futures.

We evaluate the evolution of productivity gains in cities in the People's Republic of China between 2002 and 2013. In 2002, rural migrants exerted a strong positive externality on the earnings of urban residents, which were also higher on average in cities with access to foreign markets through a seaport. In 2007 and 2013, city size (measured in terms of both employment density and land area) was the crucial determinant of productivity. Market access, whether internal or external, played no direct role. Rural migrants still enhanced urban residents’ earnings in 2007 and 2013, though the effect was less than half that in 2002. Urban gains and their evolution over time are very similar on a total and a per hour earnings basis. Finally, skilled workers and females experienced slightly larger gains than unskilled workers and males.