In recent years techniques for assessing the "sponge city" concept in practice have been developed and diversified at a rapid pace, therefore a unified assessment framework based on sponge techniques is becoming more and more important for comparing and analysing the performance of different techniques across different sponge city projects. However, previous work has mainly focused on enhancing or developing a certain single sponge technique. This research tries to establish a framework through integrating the resilience of the natural ecosystem with that of engineered infrastructure of sponge cities, forming a new concept of 'Eco-sponge resilience', and quantifying 'Ecosponge Elasticity'. In particular, a set of elasticities with a unified dimension are developed. The eco-sponge elasticity mainly consists of five types of sponge elasticity and two types of ecological elasticity, including factors such as infiltration, storage, detention, transportation and decontamination, ecological vegetation and natural ecological water elasticities, with which the value of eco-sponge elasticity of a sponge city project can be easily estimated. This research also considers a case study to interpret how to assess the ecosponge elasticities of six pilot sites of sponge city projects in Xiamen. The result shows that the presented evaluation method is feasible and helpful for assessing and enhancing the performance of sponge cities considering four aspects: the water environment, water resources, water security and water ecosystem of the urban system.

In the context of the spatial planning system reform in China, this article studies the impact of the new unified national territory spatial planning system on the planning profession and the planning education, examining the new knowledge and skills required by the system for the urban and rural planning professionals, and the correlation of the urban and rural planning discipline to the national territory spatial planning. It further explores how the urban and rural planning education should conform to the requirements of the new system and practice, reforming its educational system for the cultivation of high-level spatial planning professionals who can better meet the needs of social development.