Is established over a well-planned city layout that promotes walkability, biking and the use of public transportation systems Promotes conservation of resource by maximizing water efficiency and energy efficiency, while managing an ecologically beneficial waste management system that promotes recycling and reuse to create a zero-waste system Restores environmentally damaged urban areas Ensures decent and affordable housing for all socio-economic and ethnic groups and improves jobs opportunities for disadvantaged groups, such as women, minorities, and the disabled Supports local agriculture and produce Supports future progress and expansion over time. Besides these, each individual eco-city has an additional set of requirements to ensure ecological and economic benefits that may range from large-scale targets like zero-waste and zero-carbon emissions, as seen in the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city project and the Abu Dhabi Masdar City project, to smaller-scale interventions like urban revitalization and establishment of green roofs as seen in the case of Augustenborg, Malmö, Sweden. Cities that focus on the use of carbon-free sustainable energy and on managing greenhouse gas emissions can be referred to as zero-carbon cities. Ecocity Framework and Standards With a growing popularity of the concept, in the last few decades, there has been an exponential growth in the number of eco-cities established around the globe. To assess the performance of these eco-cities and provide future guidance, the Ecocity Framework and Standards, established by Ecocity Builders with technical support from the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) School of Construction and the Environment, provides a practical methodology for this to ensure progress towards the intended goals of eco-cities. The four pillars in this framework include: Urban Design (containing 4 criteria for access by proximity) Bio-geo Physical Features (containing 6 criteria for the responsible management of resources and materials as well as the generation and use of clean, renewable energy) Socio-cultural Features (containing 5 criteria for promoting cultural activities and community participation) Ecological Imperatives (containing 3 criteria to sustaining and restoring biodiversity) Using these, the International Eco-Cities Initiative recently identified and rated as many as 178 significant eco-city initiatives at different stages of planning and implementation around the world. To be included in this census, initiatives needed to be at least district-wide in their scale, covering a variety of sectors, and have official policy status. Although such schemes display great variety in their ambitions, scale, and conceptual underpinnings, since the late 2000s there has been an international proliferation of frameworks of