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Synergetic Evolution of Social and Natural Systems: Ecological Wisdom of Human Settlements in “The Land of Abundance”

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Ecological Wisdom

Part of the book series: EcoWISE ((EcoWISE))

Abstract

Since the industrial revolution, the relationship between human and nature has not improved in line with technological and social innovations. In this paper, we chose the Chengdu plains, known as the Land of Abundance, as our study subject. We adopt methods of comparing settlements in different eras. The results indicate that natural processes played a crucial role in determining human settlements in the Land of Abundance. Relationship between human and nature in these four phases reflects the transition from submission to nature, respect for nature, reconstruction of nature, and finally to the conquest of nature, respectively, in the pre-construction period, original construction period, development period, and modern period. We have revealed the deep wisdom of the harmonious coexistence between social and natural systems from the five aspects of the holistic view of daoshengwanwu, the practice view of daofaziran, the social view of sharing benefits across, the ethical view of Tao controls technology, and the good governance view of spontaneous order. Lastly, this paper points out several principles of landscape and urban planning in the presence of deep urban sustainability challenges: coevolution of natural and social systems would help promote sustainability of human settlements; nature-guided human settlement practice can maintain various healthy life-support systems; planning practice should be emphasized to maintain or reconstruct healthy natural process; modular units should be constructed through integrating environmental management units with planned unit development; self-governance organizations could be fostered likely based on modular units; and finally but not lastly, technology applications should be subject to restriction of environmental ethics.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Professor Wei-Ning Xiang for helpful comments on this paper. Our research has been supported by the National Natural Scientific Foundation of China (No. 51278504), and China’s postdoctoral scientific fund (No. 20110490808).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Wentao Yan

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  1. Wentao Yan
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Correspondence to Wentao Yan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Bo Yang

  2. The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Robert Fredrick Young

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Yan, W. (2019). Synergetic Evolution of Social and Natural Systems: Ecological Wisdom of Human Settlements in “The Land of Abundance”. In: Yang, B., Young, R. (eds) Ecological Wisdom. EcoWISE. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0571-9_14

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