Human settlements & infrastructure planning

IPCC WGIII AR5 chapter 12 meets some interesting items about climate change concerning urban structure.

What is urban. Often the boundary problem tries to focus three different methods: administrative, functional and morphological behaviour. That's not trivial nor univocal, since urban settlements may have different distribution and consistency. Moreover the magnification of Green Metropolis (see David Owen, 2009 ISBN 9781594488825) do not consider GHG emission produced outside the city border.  Human settlements are typically smaller than infrastructure they require and in which they are embedded; important emission sources may therefore be located outside the city territorial boundary.

Urban areas worldwide share some common GHG emission's drivers (all interdependent): Economic geography, Sociodemography, Technology and urban form.

Law-Scaling patterns. Due to methods stolen from three significant sources : frequency of vocabulary in language, hierarchy of urbanpopulation sizes and allometric scaling in metabolic bodymass rates there is a simplistic attempt to relate emissions to urban scale. But the scaling relationship is not solved.

The best seems to talk about Mature vs Growing Cities.

The four key aspects of urban form and structure are well represented with the following scheme.

source: IPCC WGIII