In order to be ready for the harsh environmental challenges of the 21 st century, cities need a new planning agenda. Defining this agenda is impossible without first revisiting the core concepts of our work: 'sustainability', 'city' and 'urban planning'. A four-fold shift in emphasis is vital: from an excessive focus on the development density, to the monitoring and taming of urban metabolism; from a single focus on sustainability to one which also includes resilience; from traditional city to urban region; from policy and land-use planning to strategic urban and regional design. In most parts of the world, the battle for the compact city is lost. However, from the perspective of ecological sustainability, perhaps it was the wrong battle anyway. We should now direct our creative energies at deploying ecological design and clean technologies on a mass scale to our unstoppable, sprawling urban regions.

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Is there a way to convert the vast, fast growing, low-density urban areas of the world to sustainability other than attempting to contain the growth and increase the density of existing development -hoping that the 'sprawl' will morph into a 'compact city'? This paper suggests 'yes'. An evolving technological and behavioural revolution will see to that. A raft of existing and coming technologies will transform urban infrastructure to the point where the low densities will become both economic and ecological. And this will come with a bonus -these technologies will also increase the resilience of city-regions, an objective which in the light already happening climate change appears even more pressing than sustainability. Before this optimistic scenario can become reality, urban planners will need to reconsider some strong and long-held views. First, a regional approach to the long term planning of any city will have to become standard, rather than the exception: the subject of spatial planning is the city-region, not the city. Second, urban planners need to free themselves of their aversion to 'urban sprawl' and be open-minded about the possibility of low-density suburbiaalbeit under specified conditions -being environmentally benign. Lastly, planners should recognize that identifying the remnant ecosystems and landscapes in the city-region is not about excluding them from development; rather it is about engaging them with the development as yet another category of urban infrastructure. These propositions have been developed as an alternative to the Draft Auckland Plan, a document released in 2011 as the strategic spatial plan for New Zealand's largest metropolitan area.

This paper presents an environmental accounting method, based on Odum's systems theory. So-called emergy analysis (spelled with an M) was here applied for evaluating sustainability of the Abruzzo Region, a large area in the middle of Italy along east coast. This study attempts to answer questions concerning: globalization (strong competition among regional and national systems, outsourcing of productive activities), energy (growth of consumptions, cost and lack of resources), territorial disequilibrium (concentration of activities and environmental impacts) and use of resources (renewable and non renewable).The aim of this research is to study a territorial system and to verify potentiality and contribution that this environmental accounting technique provides to manage and to program the future development. In particular this study aims to understand the functioning of a region based on the analysis of stocks and flows of energy and matter inside the examined area, investigating their spatial distribution and their relationships with geo-morphological structure of territory. This study further evaluates the use of local resources and aims to understand the relationships among the different parts of a territorial systems, their level of autonomy in terms of resource use and their effective spatial boundaries, which usually do not correspond to the administrative limits. The study also attempts to present the evaluation in an easily comprehensible graphic manner as digital maps.

Design with Nature had a global impact on late twentieth-century landscape architectural practice. This paper looks at both the direct influence of the text and how McHarg's ideas were developed on Waiheke Island New Zealand. The project that we will examine is the Western Waiheke Entrance Landscape (Western Landscape), a 430-ha (1065 ac.) landscape project that is now 30 years old. The project was designed by a New Zealand landscape architect/planner, Dennis Scott [DJScott Associates Ltd (DJSA)] and has been widely deemed as a well-rounded ecological, social and economic success winning the NZILA enduring landscape award in 2017 (NZILA in Showcase: enduring category winner: Waiheke Western Entrance Headland Landscape, D J Scott Associates. https ://nzila .co.nz/showc ase/waihe ke-islan d-weste rn-entra nce-headl and-lands cape, 2017). The DJSA design methodology combines integrated catchment management and a wide range of human activity into an ecologically regenerated landscape. We argue that this approach is a conscious, yet indigenous, development of Ian McHarg's theory and methodology as expounded in the seminal book Design with Nature. These ideas and the consequences for the transformation of an important landscape point to new directions for socio-ecological practice.