چارچوبی برای یکپارچه سازی برنامه ریزی شهری، ارزیابی زیست محیطی استراتژیک و برنامه ریزی زیست محیطی برای پایداری شهری در محیط چین

Sustainable development or sustainability has been highlighted as an essential principle in urban master planning, with increasing recognition that uncontrollable urbanization may well give rise to various issues such as overexploitation of natural resources, ecosystem destruction, environmental pollution and large-scale climate change. Thus, it is deemed necessary to modify the existing urban and regional administrative system so as to cope with the challenges urban planning is being confronted with and realize the purpose of urban sustainability. This paper contributed to proposing a mechanism which helps to make urban planning with full consideration of issues with respect to sustainable development. We suggested that the integration of urban planning, SEA and ecological planning be a multi-win strategy to offset deficiency of each mentioned political tool being individually applied. We also proposed a framework where SEA and ecological planning are fully incorporated into urban planning, which forms a two-way constraint mechanism to ascertain environmental quality of urban planning, although in practice, planning and SEA processes may conditionally be unified. Moreover, as shown in the case study, the integration of the three political tools may be constrained due to slow changes in the contextual factors, in particular the political and cultural dimensions. Currently within the context of China, there may be three major elements which facilitate integration of the three political tools, which are (1) regulatory requirement of PEIA on urban planning, (2) the promotion or strong administrative support from government on eco-district building, and (3) the willingness of urban planners to collaborate with SEA experts or ecologists.

The 1987 Brundtland Commission and its report “Our Common Future”, which called for “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, placed the issue of sustainable development at the core of urban policy and planning concerns (Waston, 2009). The concept of sustainable development in turn gave rise to the “green agenda” in planning and the subsequent development of environmental strategies such as Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and ecological planning which improve environmental quality of planning at initiative stage. SEA is a mechanism for incorporation of environmental consideration into policies, plans, and programs (PPPs). In countries where the SEA system is adopted, the environmental assessment on urban planning or spatial planning and the preparation of a SEA report are compulsorily required. Ecological planning is also widely applied in the fields of urban planning as an integrative and comprehensive planning to coordinate the relationship among regional social development, economic growth, technological innovation and environmental protection (Wang, 2002 and Shu et al., 2006a). Though SEA and ecological planning are widely used for environmental protection, their capabilities to influence urban planning and achieve urban sustainable development are often constrained. Throughout 1990s, both planners and environmentalists grappled with the problem of integrating the issue of sustainability into planning agendas, and in many parts of the world this has yet not been satisfactorily achieved. For one reason, planning and environmental management often operate in different government departments with different interests and political or legal framework. For the other reason, there are increasing conflicts between the green agenda (environmental concerns), the brown agenda (urban development) and the red agenda (issues of environmental justice). Moreover, Urban Planning potentially stands at the intersection of these conflicts (Allen and You, 2002). Thus it is important for both environmentalists and urban planners to collaborate and develop new approaches and systems for urban planning as well as environmental assessment to address the conflicts underlying the planning. On one hand, new urban forms were promoted which responded to environmental concerns (Breheny, 1992), and new approaches and measures in the field of urban ecology and environment were applied into urban planning (Ong, 2003, Pickett, 1995 and Li et al., 2005). On the other hand, environmentalists tried to propose a mechanism to incorporate environmental consideration into the initiative stage of decision-making process. Shu et al., 2006a and Shu et al., 2006b explained that the persistent failure of urban planning to deliver environmental sustainable development is closely linked to the separation of environmental assessment and urban planning system. Lacking of integration, the effectiveness of SEA to influence urban planning is quite limited. Therefore, we proposed a framework in which SEA and ecological planning are fully integrated into urban planning within the context of China. Under this framework, ecological planning provides ecological principles or requirements to guide the planning at a very early stage whilst SEA works as an appraisal tool in the end to ensure that environmental issues are considered in the preferred option(s). Six parts were contained in this paper: (1) The first part briefly introduced the background of this research; (2) Then the definitions of “urban planning”, “SEA/Planning Environmental Impact Assessment (PEIA)”, “ecological planning” and “integration” are elaborated in the second part; (3) Drives for the integration are analyzed from two aspects, i.e. the changes in the context of urban planning and the evolving understandings of the relationship among them; (4) We then proposed integration framework from six aspects, including the integration of objectives, processes, contents, methodologies, institutions and policies. Then, we designed the process which lies largely in the realm of urban planning, including nine steps, e. g. objective and content definition, scoping, option proposal, and environmental assessment on options, etc.; (5) Subsequently, a case study of “Eco-district Plan of the Chengnan New District of Jintan County in Jiangsu Province” is briefly introduced in the fifth part, which approved that the integration framework is applicable and practical within the context of China; and (6) Conclusions.

Although the traditional planning and SEA approaches should not be prematurely abandoned, it does not mean they should stay unimproved. This paper argued that the integration of urban planning, SEA and ecological planning may be a response to persistent failure of urban planning to deliver social and environmental justice, and such integration helps to promote the effectiveness of SEA and ecological planning. All these achievements owe to this framework which not only goes beyond independent ecological planning or SEA, but also seeks to input the environmental and ecological considerations into the urban planning and design process. This integration model highlights the collaboration between planners and SEA professionals and ecologists. In this model, actors with different knowledge, from different departments with distinguished interests could have the opportunities to communicate and bargain, thus to reach a “consensus” in which both environmentalists and planners, on behalf of environmental authorities and planning authorities, respectively, will work together to produce a “red and green urban plan” which not only concerns city development but also environmental protection and social justice. In consequence, this “integrated mechanism” may help to break the “institutional barriers” existing for long between urban planning authorities and environmental authorities in China. Transformed from a review approach used by environmental authorities into an internal assessment mechanism in the plan process, SEA would not anymore be regarded as a political tool by environmental authorities to intervene or hinder planning authorities to utilize their power, but as a measure to improve plan quality by incorporating environmental considerations, and thereby to incrementally improve effectiveness of the planning itself. Thus the long-term opposition from urban planning authorities towards the plan environmental impact assessment will be reversed, not forcibly by legal requirements, but by the change in their mindset. Moreover, the relationship between ecological plans and urban plans would also be transformed if we make efforts to formulate an ecological urban plan, or make urban plans more ecological, rather than separate ecological plans from legally required urban plans. Through this integration process, the previous “competitive” relationship between these two plans would be changed into “collaborative” and “mutually supportive”. On one hand, the core purpose of developing an ecological plan, i.e. to build an ecological city or to develop the city in a more ecological way, would be achieved through urban planning guided by ecological principles. On the other hand, the “grey” urban planning or development strategies would be optimized into “green” and “red” urban plans if they were formed entirely based on ecological principles and regulated by the SEA process. In conclusion, this integration model aims to unify the “separated” three subjects into a “combined” one, which can help change long-term inconsistency or even “fighting” relationship between ecological planning, urban planning and SEA, and incrementally have positive impacts on facilitating “harmony” between key stakeholders involved in the process, i.e. the administrative departments (e.g. environmental authorities and urban planning authorities), ecologists, urban planners, and SEA professionals. However, the practical case study further demonstrated that implementation of this mechanism, which attempts to improve their effectiveness by influencing the context where the ecological planning, urban planning and SEA operate (i.e. the planning culture, political and institutional dimensions) is also influenced by the contextual dimensions. Regulatory requirement, strong political or administrative support, and evolving understanding of urban sustainability from officials (e.g. particularly those who have the power to dominate urban construction and planning development, such as the officials from urban planning authorities, etc.) are three key elements to facilitate the integration of SEA and ecological planning into urban planning in China. Though the contextual dimensions have not fully evolved for effective implementation of this integration mechanism, the situation is about to be changed since the large promotion of eco-civilization construction in 2008. The attempts to promote the PEIA practice in China, as reflected by the promulgation of PEIA Regulation in 2009, will also help improve the contextual elements to implement this integration mechanism.