Browsing by Author "Liu, Jieling"

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Complex Systems, Climate Change, Urban Health and the Human Scale: An Evolutionary Complex Systems Perspective on Urban Health
(2019) Gatzweiler, Franz; Liu, Jieling; Kumar, Manasi
"Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of climate change, urban health and wellbeing, sustainably and yet in accordance with human needs, have often been implicitly biased by well-intended ideas such as being ‘human-scale’ or ‘people-centred’. With increasing urban populations and increasing urban systems interconnectivity, cities as we knew them transform into city regions or clusters and the externalized costs of such growth are increasingly shared with people who become marginalized and detached. We present ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-oriented’ ideas of urban development from an evolutionary systems perspective, as expressions of two types of socio-political organisation with different degrees of self-organisation. We refer to multi-level selection theory to explain the maladies of current urban developments, their negative impacts on people’s health, the environment and the reasons for denial or not being able or willing to act in response to the available knowledge about urban and planetary health problems. Finally, we make recommendations for governance to address the systemic problems of urban health."
The Missing Puzzle to Achieving People-Centred Urban Development and Ecological Governance for Climate Change in China
(2019) Liu, Jieling
"Is people-centered urban development in China achievable through institutionalizing urban ecological governance in a top-down fashion, for repairing urban environments and mitigating climate change impacts at the city level, and scaling it up to the national and even global level? Ecological civilization, the development paradigm and national environmental policy framework behind the people-centered urban development goals, conveys a deep, philosophical and humanistic connotation. Chinese cities may be able to reduce environmental externality and achieve people-centered development goals efficiently, given the government’s highly centralized power and political determination. However, whether people-centered urban development in China can truly be sustainable in the long term, relies upon the variety of human needs it recognizes and the efforts it takes to fulfill them for people to co-exist well in a collective society. The people-centered urban development in China backed by the concept of ecological civilization recognizes the universal human need and equity for quality nature and presumes providing quality nature would be sufficient to achieve sustainability. Such a view underestimates people as only being the beneficiaries of quality nature and fails to grasp and expand people’s potential capability to also be the primary means for quality nature. Genuine people-centeredness requires taking into account the cultural, aesthetic and political functions of human agents and their higher need to actualize these functions through participation. Such is needed for Chinese cities to govern natural ecological environment and develop sustainably in the long term, transcending the physical equilibria of human-nature relationship for achieving true ecological civilization"