The relationship between sustainable urban development and environmental sustainability is crucial to every strategy of urban transformation, renewal and regeneration. In particular, urban regeneration entails programmes of urban transformation that involve the rehabilitation of existing parts of a city, re-use previously built-up area and abandoned buildings, and redevelop blighted urban spaces to increase urban sustainability.

This work describes a methodology for Strategic Environmental Assessment of urban areas in Latin America based on the recently approved European Planning Directive, and applies it to the Metropolitan Area of Concepción (Chile). The method is based on the Land Suitability Index (LSI), a cartographic GIS-based index originally developed for the region of Barcelona (Spain) and aimed at determining the suitability of each point in a region for urban development, considering three sub-indexes: (i) Naturalness, (ii) Ecological Connectivity and (iii) Natural Risk.

Given the regional geographic specificities of Central Andean valleys, the social and environmental impact of dispersed urbanization on smallholder farmers is particularly high in the new urban peripheries of Peruvian mountain cities.

Cities are facing considerable challenges resulting from imminent climate change impacts. Urban planning to minimise adverse impacts of climate change at the city level can establish a climate-resilient city. Mitigation strategies to reduce CO₂ emissions would lead to a climate-friendly city. Integrating climate change adaptation and mitigation into sustainable city planning should not be merely added as a single level of sustainable city planning, but requires a wide range of multi-level cooperation.

Quantifying the urban landscape pattern and its change is fundamental for monitoring and assessing the ecological and socio-economic consequences of urbanization. Using Indian Remote Sensing Panchromatic (IRS-PAN) imagery of 2002 and combining gradient analysis with landscape metrics, we compared the landscape patterns between metropolises and small-sized cities with increasing grain size. Landscape metrics were computed along a 51 × 9 km transect cutting across Shanghai and a 16 × 2 km transect cutting across Zhangjiagang with a moving window.

Hollow-bearing trees provide habitat for diverse taxonomic groups and as such they are recognised for their importance globally. There is, however scant reference to this resource relative within urban forest patches. The functional ecology of habitat remnants along an urbanisation gradient plays an important ecological, social and economic role within urban landscapes. Here we quantify the impacts of urbanisation, landscape, environmental, disturbance (past and present) and stand variables on hollow-bearing tree density within urban forest patches.

Urban green areas are important sites established for recreational, ecological, and aesthetical purposes. Urban green areas are different form the other green space usage, can be used by the all parts of the community. Public green space standards, construction law No. 3194 of the plan to be built on the basis of 10 m² per person in the regulations "active green space" is defined as. About the amount of green space in the regulation applies to active green space. Active green space are defined parks, children's playground and play areas.

A map showing various urban features, such as buildings, roads, and vegetation, is useful for a variety of urban planning applications. The objective of this study was to incorporate road and parcel GIS data as well as relevant expert knowledge to classify different urban land covers from 1-meter, 4-band NAIP images. Based on a hybrid simultaneous-classification and one-by-one-classification approach, a total of 14 urban classes are classified.

Impervious surfaces are the result of urbanization that can be explicitly quantified, managed and controlled at each stage of land development. It is a very useful environmental indicator that can be used to measure the impacts of urbanization on surface runoif, water quality, air quality, biodiversity and microclimate. Therefore, accurate estimation of impervious surfaces is critical for urban environmental monitoring, land management, decision-making and urban planning.

In urban areas, the competition between land development and ecological conservation is intense. To mitigate the negative effects of urbanization, we developed a methodology to plan a spatially explicit conservation network based on widely available remotely sensed data and other auxiliary data. First, as an area of strategic significance for the conservation of regional flora and fauna and for maintaining high environmental quality to promote human well-being, the remaining natural and semi-natural areas were identified as ecologically primary areas.

The concept of Ecosystem Services has gained traction on the scientific agenda and has found its way into research on urban environments. Cities and towns, like any other ecosystem, provide specific services to their inhabitants and communities and they are benefited by surrounding ecosystems as well. Among the different categories, typical Ecosystem Services categories such as food production and erosion control usually have a lesser importance within urban contexts.

Landscape connectivity is of paramount importance not only in maintaining both functionality and resilience of social-ecological systems, but also in providing Ecosystem Services (ESs). Despite recent efforts, several issues still need to be faced to fully integrate ESs evaluation relating to landscape connectivity into effective plans and environmental assessment procedures. Choosing an appropriate scale of analysis is one of the most problematic topics, since it can profoundly affect the evaluation of single patch contribution to global connectivity.