Promoting urban-rural landscape sustainability through geodesign
Lu Huang, Jiangxiao Qiu, Jianguo Wu
Abstract
Urban and rural areas constitute the primary human living spaces, with cities currently being home to 57% of the global population—a figure projected to rise to 68% by 2050 (UN-Habitat 2022 ; World Bank Group 2024 ). Although the earliest cities appeared about 6,000 years ago (Lobo et al. 2020 ), it was not until the first Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s that global urbanization began to accelerate exponentially (Forman and Wu 2016 ; Wu 2022 ). The most dramatic growth of global urban population took off in the 1950s—the beginning of the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’, a period when human activities fundamentally shape the state and functioning of the Earth System (Steffen et al. 2015 ). Urbanization has certainly captured a great deal of intellectual attention from both natural and social sciences and has also been at the forefront of sustainability research and practice. Urban ecology has become mainstream since the 1990s (Pickett et al. 2001 ; Wu 2014 ; Pickett and Cadenasso 2017 ), and urban science (or the science of cities) is emerging as an increasingly interdisciplinary field (Batty 2013 ; Lobo et al. 2020 ; McPhearson et al. 2016 ).