Integrating Low-carbon Concepts in Urban Planning: Practices in Xiamen and Implications

Cities are critical battlefronts in the struggle to mitigate climate change crisis. Urban planning is widely recognized as an important policy and technology tool for the low-carbon development of cities. However, the methods of integrating low-carbon concept into the existing planning system and practices have yet to be studied. More cases are still needed to examine the existing wisdom. By taking the Chinese city of Xiamen as a case study, this study attempts to show a city's efforts to make itself "a low-carbon city in China" in the field of urban planning, to sketch out the general governance framework that make those efforts work, and meanwhile to analyse the problems existing in the process, in the hope of providing some references for those who are concerned about low-carbon city development.