城镇化与生态环境“耦合魔方”的基本概念及框架

城镇化与生态环境耦合系统是人地关系地域系统的重要一环,面对新时代全球尺度的远程联系、时空压缩与社会经济重构,传统的研究框架急需转型和升级。借鉴人地关系地域系统、远程耦合和星球城市化等理论,从复杂性科学视角出发,首先解析了城镇化与生态环境耦合系统的内涵,进而从空间、时间、表象和组织四个维度,提出了一个解释城镇化与生态环境耦合机理的分析框架——“耦合魔方（CHNC）”,并论述了其概念、内涵、演化规律和分析框架：魔方中的系统与系统、系统与要素、要素与要素间通过各种“耦合线”相互联系与作用,形成一个彼此嵌套、相互联系、对立统一的有机整体;魔方的旋转代表了不同地域间城镇化与生态环境的时空非线性耦合作用,系统通过不断能量交换,产生临界相变与整体涌现性,长期处于有序与无序之间的中间状态;“耦合魔方”包括近远程耦合、近远期耦合、组内间耦合和显隐性耦合,共四个维度,八种类型。重点剖析了远程、远期、组间和隐性耦合的科学内涵、研究方法与典型案例,并形成更具普遍意义的人地关系耦合矩阵。“耦合魔方”为揭示城镇化与生态环境耦合系统的演化和机理提供一个更加全面系统的跨学科研究范式,拓展了人地系统耦合研究的分析维度,为面向人类福祉的区域可持续发展政策制定提供科学支撑。

The Coupled Human and Natural Cube: A conceptual framework for analyzing urbanization and eco-environment interactions

The coupled urbanization and eco-environment system is an important aspect of coupled human and natural systems. However, the time-space compression, long range interactions, and reconstruction of socio-economic structure at the global scale pose great challenges to the traditional analysis frameworks for human-nature systems. We are in urgent need of developing a brand new analysis framework. In this paper, based on the connotation of the coupled urbanization and eco-environment system and its four dimensions — space, time, appearance and organization, we propose a conceptual framework "Coupled Human and Natural Cube (CHNC)" to explain the coupling mechanism between urbanization and eco-environment, which is inspired by the theories including human-earth areal system, telecoupling, planetary urbanization, and perspectives from complexity science. We systematically introduce the concept, connotation, evolution rules and analysis dimensions of the CHNC. It is worth noting that there exist various "coupling lines" in the CHNC, which connects different systems and elements at multiple scales, and forms a nested, interconnected organic bigger system. The rotation of the CHNC represents the spatiotemporal nonlinear fluctuation of the urbanization and eco-environment system in different regions. As the system exchanges energy with the environment continually, the critical phase transition occurs when fluctuation reaches a certain threshold, and leads to emergence behaviors of the system. The CHNC has four dimensions — pericoupling and telecoupling, syncoupling and lagcoupling, apparent coupling and hidden coupling, intra-organization coupling and inter-organization coupling. We mainly focus on the theoretical connotation, research methods and typical cases of telecoupling, lagcoupling, hidden coupling, and inter-organization coupling, and finally put forward a human-nature coupling matrix to integrate multiple dimensions. In summary, the CHNC provides a more comprehensive and systematic research paradigm for understanding the evolution and coupling mechanism of the human-nature system, which expands the analysis dimension of coupled human and natural systems, and provides some scientific supports to formulate regional sustainable development policies for human wellbeing.