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Vast populations have spread into cities and contributed to urban sprawl in China. Rural villages have not had enough time to self-renew and become directly involved in the urban fabric. As a result, rural villages have become urbanized. Throughout the shockingly speedy process of urbanization in China over the past four decades, the urban village has played an irreplaceable role in the city by accommodating a vast number of migrants, thus mitigating the problem of the increasing shortage of housing brought about by rapid urbanization. However, the long-standing, controversial question of how to renovate urban villages remains due to their unique characteristics. In recent years, instead of demolition, Shenzhen renew the urban villages by renovating the original village buildings (which are 7–8 stories tall) and converting them into rental apartments, as the planning policy of comprehensive renovation (zonghezhengzhi). Could the comprehensive renovation be applied to urban villages in the north of the country? In this study, we found that the formation mechanism and development of urban villages in the north and south are similar, and the challenges and contradictions in the process of transformation are alike. However, there are differences in spatial form and architectural style. The typical urban village in Beijing shows the form of quadrangular houses two stories tall or less in the north is relatively low in terms of building volume ratio. In addition, the spatial form is related to the commercial form of the urban village and also influences the income consisting of the villagers' collective share and rental income, which is derived from fixed assets (e.g. houses, factory buildings). In turn, spatial and commercial form affects the cost of the mode of transformation (demolition/redevelopment or integrated transformation). Therefore, we believe that regional differences in physical space should not be ignored in policy decisions and that different criteria should be considered and applied under different local policies.

With the rapid development of China's urbanization, the gap between the development level of China's cities and villages is becoming more and more obvious. The rapid increase in the urban population has aggravated the utilization of urban land resources. While rural areas have a large number of residential land, the population is decreasing year by year, which presents great potential for development. How to coordinate the relationship between urban and rural areas has become an important issue in China. In recent years, the Chinese government has made a series of attempts in the peri-urbanization areas between cities and villages. In 2017, based on the project named New Pastoralism, the central government in China put forward a planning mode named Rural Complex, which retains the local residents and forms a community to attract new residents, also with the aid of tourism to attract consumers from the city. As a pilot project, New Pastoralism has been operating for several years. As a pilot scheme, it brings some good effects but it also has some defects, especially in its management. Meanwhile there are few studies on its management, operation, and its effects on urban-rural development in China.This paper will take the New Pastoralism project as an example, studying its defects as well as the positive influence of its planning, construction, operation, and management modes based on the related policies, to discusses whether the Rural Complex can play a positive role in coordinating urban-rural development in China.

Urban agriculture has drawn much scholarly attention in recent years. In Japan, urban agricultural traditions go back 400 years, to the Edo period, and persist even today. Although urban farmland has various ecological and social benefits, it is still unstable to position it as part of the green infrastructure of a modern city; for spatial, ecological and social-functional dimensions. First, it is unclear whether the amount and location of urban farmland is adequate to call it the “infrastructure” of the city. Secondly, pesticides and fertilizers are used on farmland, which causes environmental pollution. Third, since farmland is privately owned land and considered to be a site of economic production, it often lacks the features of public space. This study surveyed 22 local governments within 20 km of Tokyo city centre and organized by three survey methods. The first evaluates the relationship between the quantity and location of urban parks and urban farmlands. The second evaluates the regulation and rules of pesticide use in urban farmland. The third survey analyses Japanese municipalities’ farmland policies and identifies the functions that local communities expect from urban farmland. These results indicate that urban farmland complement city parks with quantity and location, consider the effects of pesticides on local residents, and performs sufficient functions of public. It can be said that urban agriculture effectively contributes to the realization of multifunctional urban green infrastructure.

A worldwide introduction of renewable energy has been required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Concomitantly, this has caused conflict between renewable energy development and local communities over landscape changes. This study aims to clarify the factors of conflict and find a way of conflict management. A case study on Japan is used, where a solar rush occurred due to the feed-in tariff (FIT) system. We analyze the public reasons to worry about renewable energy and the spatial characteristics of its locations. A socio-spatial approach is used by first utilizing a qualitative survey based on questionnaires and interviews with the local governments to understand the awareness regarding the issues, and then utilizing a quantitative survey on the location changes to solar power by using GIS. The results suggest that there were links between local governments&rsquo, concerns and the location of solar power concentration. These results show that conflicts over renewable energy are not unavoidable and may be managed by local governments that can act as intermediaries with sufficient knowledge of the local communities.

The biodiversity and carbon dioxide absorption function of forests have received attention due to global warming. However, most of the world’s forests are general production forests. Since production forests are maintained by production activities, a decrease in production or abandonment of management leads to a decline in forest functions and increases the risk of disasters such as landslides. Against this background, the retention approach has been proposed as a way to convert general production forests into forests with enhanced environmental functions, but it has rarely been applied due to technical and cost barriers. This study focuses on cost barriers and examines the possibility of introducing a retention approach to converting production forests to environmental forests, using Japan as a case study. About 70% of Japan’s land area is covered with forests, 40% of which are production forests. However, due to the sharp decline in demand for timber in recent years and price competition with imported timber, the selling price of timber has fallen below the cost of managing production forests, and the management of many production forests has been abandoned. The dilemma is that the retention approach applied to the wood production process cannot be applied to forests where production activities are stagnant. Therefore, we explored the possibility of recovering the necessary costs with carbon credits that are available in the Japanese market. We calculated the cumulative carbon stocks of carbon dioxide in production forests by age, using intensity, and estimated how many years after planting the combined costs of normal production forests management and the retention approach would balance out. Our calculations show that even if carbon credits were sold at the lowest market price, the balance of payments would be balanced about 30 years after planting, resulting in a net profit from the sale of the wood.

This study describes the environmental impacts of lumber for building construction in Japan, focusing on CO2 emission. First, we collected the inventory data of several patterns of lumber with domestically-made or foreign-made using a case study approach based on some fieldworks.Second, we tried to estimate the volume of each and total CO2 emissions. Finally, we analyzed the issue of estimating method. According to the results, the patterns show obvious differences especially in transportation phase and kiln-drying phase. In addition, the emission coefficients have big influence on the results.

Wood is the one of three main construction materials. Comparing to other two, Iron and Concrete, recycling rate of wood is low and its material flow is not clear yet. One reason of such situation is that there are so many recycling methods of wood. In this research, we tried to make real situation clear concerning about wooden construction materials which manufactured in Akita prefecture. Then we tried to evaluate effects of recycling in some lumber factories using Life Cycle Assessment tool.