The eight papers in this special issue touched a variety of issues and took many approaches to deal with the new sustainability problems in East Asia. The cities and regions being introduced in mainland and Taiwan in China and Korea are good representatives of those areas largely affected by the physical and social transformation in the course of urbanization. The authors have explored the related problems from a wide range of perspectives, including urban development, environment-friendly planning, eco-tourism, community development, and cross-border cooperation. The research methodologies presented in this issue also ranged from quantitative spatial analysis with the applications of GIS and RS to qualitative analysis. The findings and proposals are expected to provide insights for other cities and regions bothered with similar problems.

The identification of urban growth boundaries (UGBs) as components of an ecologically liveable city is rather significant in urban space management. However, the evaluation of ecosystem service in establishing UGBs as reactions to protect open spaces and ecological sensitive area are largely ignored. Furthermore, the lack of scenario analysis for urban growth patterns has made it difficult to adjust planning existed. Accordingly, in this paper, we take Hangzhou metropolitan areas (HMA) as the study area, using Landsat TM image data, and established the UGBs for the HMA based on ecosystem service by the Green Infrastructure Assessment (GIA) model with scenario analysis. The results suggested that: 1) The risk of urban development in the northern and eastern areas of the central city is relatively low, while the southern, eastern and south-western areas need intensive protection; 2) In the model of ecological management, the erosion of ecological space has increased gradually and the regional ecological patterns in the fourth scenarios have faced great challenges; 3) UGBs for the HMA were identified as the view of development and ecological space complementarily.

Many urban industrial concentration areas are becoming mixtures of intensive industrial and residential land use. While they play important roles in urban economy and employment, the energy consumption and pollution discharge in the process of industrial production bring mang negative effects on surrounding people and environments. In this paper, a tool is proposed to evaluate the environmental efficiency (EE) of the industrial concentration areas in order to coordinate the functioning of economic activities and environmental protection. Based upon discussion on the principal and significance of EE assessment in urban industrial concentration areas, an empirical study is conducted in Fengtai district, Beijing, to elaborate the idea from three aspects: socio-economic contribution, environmental load, and environmental risk. The study area was divided into 1379 grids of 500 m*500 m as the basic spatial unit while the spatial size effect and its rationality of the environmental functions have been testified. As the result, it turned out that the amount of the low EE grids account for 71.15% of the total districts while the rather high environmental load grids 20.18%. In the meantime, we found out that the area of low EE value grids have the tendency to aggregate towards the central urban areas, along urban express ring roads and around wholesale markets. These results shed light to implementing the refined environmental spatial management and control.

IPCC AR5 notes that since the 1950s, changes in climate systems, ocean, sea levels, icebergs, carbon and other biochemistry have been unprecedented. If the emission rate of greenhouse gases remains constant or increases, then the effects of climate change will become severe. Accordingly, research on vulnerability, mitigation and adaptation of climate change is required. With respect to those considerations, development of the concept of resilience and the construction of resilient cities has become a critical and important task for sustainable urban and regional development. This study begins by providing a brief introduction of the significant impacts of climate change globally and, in particular, in Taiwan. The second section analyzes concepts related to resilient cities, including vulnerability, adaptation, resilience, governance and community empowerment. The third section proposes principles to govern the construction of resilient cities through community empowerment, based on a literature review and documentary analyses. The final section presents conclusions and suggestions.

Government-led ecotourism has advantages including a clear vision and quick outcome; nevertheless, it has stimulated conflicts between government and residents, owing to environmental degradation, stringent regulations, and operating deficits. Consequently, resident-led ecotourism, based on residents’ opinions, has emerged as an alternative to construct ecotourism sites; however, this has stimulated chaos owing to the presence of numerous stakeholders. It is thus necessary to develop a collaborative management plan between two systems. This study analyses the subjectivities of the stakeholders of Maha Ecotourism Site, Pyeongchang, where the operating rights have been transferred to residents owing to the recent conflict between the government and residents. The findings reveal the issue of facility development in government-led ecotourism and the absence of an actual goal and consequently chaotic management in resident-led ecotourism. Furthermore, both the systems face the issue of consensus with regard to the management of regulation, space, safety, land price, and industrial structure.

The pace of cross-border sub-regional cooperation is accelerating in the worldwide; ways of institutional cooperation guided by policy has become the trend of regional development gradually. The collaborative development of urban planning system is one of deciding factors in sub-regional cooperation. Fujian and Taiwan have deep connections and the strategic visions of cross-strait cooperation was formed. The approval of Pingtan Experimental Area provided conditions and spaces for the realization of cooperation and it proposed a new pattern of joint planning, development and management in the same year. Based on that, this study attempts to find and analyze the collaboration points which are significant to promote joint management by making a comparison of system of laws and regulations, system of operation and system of administration in urban planning system between the mainland China and Taiwan. Then we will build an operational framework of sub-regional cooperation based on the method of shift-of-context analysis. Related references are including: (1) Add necessary control requirements of building and land use into legal aspects; (2) Strengthen the connections between master plan and detailed planning; (3) Set up special departments for planning review under legal management in administrative cooperation; (4) Implement management for various lands in the same way to promote overall effective development of Pingtan.

In this paper, method of scenario planning is applied to the study of land use planning, putting forward a new approach to analyze future growth of city's built-up land in the context of future uncertainty. By introducing economic and policy factors into land use system, a calculation model of urban built-up land is built based on the correlation between industries and land use. And using Chongqing Municipality from China as an example, we establish 6 different scenarios and simulate future development of city's land use from 2015 to 2020 under each scenario. The results indicate that Chongqing will meet fast urban expansion according to current trend and is in urgent need to improve its land use efficiency which shows strongest effect in controlling city size.

The development of urban tourism community (UTC) will bring new vigor and vitality into the urban sustainable development. There are abundant tourists’ comments about personal experience in UTC in online travel communities, which provide good access to the knowledge of negative perceptions of urban tourism community. Based on online comments, this paper used content analysis method to research tourists’ negative perceptions about five typical tourism communities in Beijing, whereby the common problems and special problems of UTC were identified. According to the research results, the authors made suggestions to the sustainable development of UTC in Beijing.

Hotspot identification or detection has been widely used in many fields; however the traditional grid-based approaches may incur some problems when dealing with point database. This article expands on three types of mismatch problems in grid-based approach and suggests a point-based approach may be more suitable. Inspired by the DBSCAN algorithm, a self-adjusting approach is then proposed for hotspot detection which overcomes the weakness of parameter sensitivity shared by most clustering approaches. Finally, the data of commercial points of interest of a city is used for demonstration.