JAUE2014-019 From Sustainable to Low Carbon City: Zero Emission Urban Mobility in Japanese Cities

Abstract

Sustainability in term of urban development is always related to these three factors, which are economic, social, and ecological value in either local or global context. Until now the term, sustainable, has inspired many great urban development concepts such as garden city, smart city, intelligent city, environmentally-friendly city, eco-city, waterfront city, green city, resilient city, and then low carbon city. Each concept responded to main issue for urban development at the time although they overlapped each other as well. The major issue now for urban development is global warming resulted from the emission of greenhouse gases. To deal with this, Japan has already set up a guideline for low carbon urban development to create more compact city to minimize travel distance and then encourages walking and bicycling as means of zero emission urban mobility to reduce environmental burden and energy consumption of the city and its citizen. This paper studied and summarized the development and implementation of low carbon city concept specifically focusing on the improvement on walking 
and bicycling facilities in Japanese cities.