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With the rapid development of rural urbanization, rural areas, especially in northwest China, have been exposed many problems. Living quality cannot be guaranteed. Environmental quality is deteriorating. Rural development has encountered the unprecedented problems and challenges. Under the background of the integration of urban and rural areas, the development of rural areas is also in a dilemma. In this research, based on the actual situation of Guanzhong region in Shaanxi Province, the rural villages are classified according to their resources, environment and formation time. At the same time, combined with previous literature, a group of villages has been selected as object to conduct on-site investigation and analysis including ecological environment, planning layout, public space, building energy saving and so on. Hopefully, the analysis of physical formation can makes people have a more in-depth understanding of sustainability. We are going to understand the problems encountered and solutions related in the sustainable development of rural areas from a critical perspective. By putting forward the corresponding strategies and development focus, a set of multiple sustainable development model for different types of villages has been summarized and proposed. Importantly, it can be some enlightenments for further studies.

With the modernization and urbanization in recent decades, a mounting number of buildings has been built. Due to the limited land, these buildings were built higher and higher and side by side which created ‘Wall Effect’ blocking the wind and reducing air ventilation. It eventually led to bad thermal comfort of people. Therefore, sky gardens are increasingly important today, as they can significantly contribute to improving air ventilation by reducing ‘Wall Effect’. In order to know better about the influence generated by sky gardens to natural ventilation improvement, I selected the Hysan Place as a case study based on CFD simulation. I built two models --- the original model and the model without sky gardens for the simulation in different height. By comparison of different models, I found that the sky gardens of Hysan Place did can slight improve air ventilation of surrounding areas. Sky garden is an effective method to alleviate urban heat island effect, which is important to improve urban living quality, especially extreme high construction density.

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An urban ecological zone (UEZ) is an important part of a city, focusing on environmental conservation and ecological economic development simultaneously. During the past decade, the urban scale of Xi’an city in China has been expanding, and the population has been increasing rapidly. This dramatic change is a huge challenge to urban sustainability. It puts forward higher requirements for the construction of an UEZ. Under different spatial resolution scales, this study adopted Landsat8-OLI and gaofen-2 (GF-2) satellite high-resolution remote sensing data to interpret the land use/cover change (LUCC) of the Weihe River UEZ. The ecosystem service value (ESV) was assessed, and the ecological effect was analyzed based on LUCC. The results showed that the spatial distribution of land types in the Weihe River UEZ changed significantly from 2014 to 2020. The construction land gathered to the southeast. Especially, the vegetative land (i.e., forestland, grassland and other green land) and water body showed a slightly increasing trend since the official establishment of the UEZ in 2018. The cultivated land area gradually reduced, and the vegetative land area tended to be concentrated as well as expanded. Through the interpretation of GF-2 remote sensing data, the ESV at the Weihe River UEZ showed a downward trend in general. The high-value areas were mainly distributed in the Weihe River and its surrounding beach areas, which were greatly affected by river water scope. Construction land normally had low ESV, and it was affected by human activities obviously. Therefore, the development of urban construction had significant impacts on the Weihe River UEZ.