Executive: Zhang Lei （Professor， Institute of Geographical Sciences and Resource Research，CAS）

Abstract:

As an essential task of human survival and development in modern time, the sustainable development of cities is recognized as a long process of searching for a balanced input-output in materials,energy, men and information. From this pointview, cities in any country or region are growing upon their resource-environment base. People,nowadays, have gotten used to give a great concern on the optimism of city′s out,such as the city′s GDP value and population, rather than on the change of the resource-environment base which the city depends on, such as material supply, energy supply, water supply and environment degradation. Considering an intensified man-land relationship in China, the country has had to face a greater challenge in the process of urbanization, that is how to build up a sound resource-environment base for its national urbanization. It is, therefore, that this program is proposed to explore the mechanism of the interrelation and interaction between city′s growth and its resource-environment change in terms of the practice of China′s urbanization itself and some relative models. Such a study could be useful for the research progress in regional sustainable development dealing with a growing concern on the change of the coordinated relationship between human survival and the fragile resource-environment base, as well as dealing with the change of the coordinated relationship between man’s survival and its resources-environment base under the bigger pressure of a rapid spatial agglomeration (urbanization)in China.