1. Overview: Green City Planning and Practices in Asian Cities

This chapter is provided as an introduction and summary of the whole book’s contents. From the viewpoint of planners and architects, the summary presents the key contributions of the book on a three-dimensional scale of the green concept, including buildings, the community, and the city. This book draws extensively on multidisciplinary research and practice to convey implementation of green concepts in Asian cities in achieving sustainable development. The book aims to present current developments in the green city concept, research, and applications in Asian cities. Most of the works focus on building scale as an essential unit of the green city, which can be functionalized through ecology restoration as well as user comfort where the building envelope can serve as a three-dimensional landscape for greening the city and modifying indoor environments. There are several indications that the green city concept may shift to absorb and merge with the smart concept in Asian cities to accomplish sustainable and smart living environments by technology innovation and embedding of information and communications technology (ICT) into city units and systems.