Urban Green Transition: Conceptual Change and Stakeholder Involvement in Depth

Abstract

Urban transition is a multi-dimensional cooperative process accompanied with increasing uncertainty in a city's size, location, complex function system and variant resources endowment. As direct participants and beneficiaries, stakeholders including local governments, enterprises and citizens have played an essential role in urban development. The existing research on urban transition, however, has been generally confined to the cognition of economic and institutional transition, so that the discussion of all stakeholders is weakened and marginalized, especially in the aspect of citizen involvement.This paper looks into the relationships between the fragile ecological environment and severe urban diseases, such as traffic jams, rocketing housing prices and overpopulation in current China, arguing that urban green transition is a new opportunity to heal the urban diseases and to create a sustainable urban future. Based upon influences on urbanization in social, economic and environmental dimensions, this paper admits a common consensus for economic indicators like GDP, which though cannot reflect the comprehensiveness of sustainability, and puts forward a more systematic and theoretical framework of urban transition towards greening. Given the distinctive contexts of China, it emphasizes the significance of the conceptual change and stakeholder involvement relevant to the process of the transition in question as safeguards defending urban sustainable development. Literature analysis is applied in this research to develop the framework of urban green transition which can provide replicable experiences for researchers and policy makers.