Urban planning, urban Management & Urban Air Pollution and solutions for solving it

Abstract

In response to the facts that some Asian developing countries were experiencing the fastest rate of industrialisation and urbanisation, several international initiatives called for a better and ‘sustainable’ urban management. Development of management tools including strategic environmental assessment (SEA), life cycle assessment (LCA), cost benefit analysis (CBA), and environmental management system (EMS) had widened a scope of traditional management remarkably. For instance, urban water management that used to deal only with an aspect of ‘urban water’ is nowadays required to consider urban water issues in a larger perspective, namely whole river and catchment’s ecosystem. The management of the latter is called river basin management. Yet still, it is also realised that various managements (e.g. air, poverty, water, socio-economic etc.) were actively inter-linked and influenced each other on the same platform of ‘urban’ and could not be dealt in isolation. As a challenge to respond to these complex urban problems, an ecosystem approach was considered to be a powerful tool to achieve a holistic management. By taking widely known ecosystem approach frameworks into consideration, this paper attempted to discuss on applicability of ecosystem approach to urban air pollution management. The review provided current knowledge on urban air pollution problems and pros and cons of urban and peri-urban agriculture as an example. In discussion, millennium ecosystem framework and human ecosystem frameworks were explored in terms of urban air pollution management. This inspired a process approach and its usefulness was analysed in the light of translating the philosophy of ecosystem approach into practise. In this particular case, ambient urban air pollution and promotion of urban and peri-urban agriculture was discussed as an example. The findings showed that although the process approach could supplement those frameworks in practise to some extent, it had a difficulty in addressing the social system that played a major role in urban ecosystem. It was indicated that the social system was considered to associate closely with spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the target area. And the approach must figure out a way to incorporate them effectively towards successful urban ecosystem approach. The suggestion was made on another approach that could facilitate to bring the philosophy of ecosystem approach into actual urban management.