The World Bank defines eco-cities as "cities that enhance the well-being of citizens and society through integrated urban planning and management that harness the benefits of ecological systems and protect and nurture these assets for future generations".
[5] In the first half of the 19th century, the Garden City of Ebenezer Howard, the urbanistic thought of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier laid the foundations for a radical change of paradigm and a comprehensive transformation in the urban planning canon.
[7] Founded by a group of visionary architects and activists including Richard Register in Berkeley, California, the organization worked at the intersection of urban planning, ecology, and public participation to help formulate design concepts centered around building environmentally healthier cities.
[7][8] Some of their efforts included initiating movements to plant trees along the main streets, promoting the construction of solar greenhouses, developing environment-friendly policies by working with the Berkeley city planning division and encouraging public transportation.
During the latter half of the 20th century, concepts surrounding environmentally friendly or nature-conscious communities expanded in scope, coinciding with a deeper understanding of ecological complexities.
Recognizing the far-reaching consequences of ecosystem dynamics, pollution, and natural resource depletion, it became clear that a city's ecological footprint must be managed not only at the local level but also regionally and globally.
Eco-Cities in China have received strong support from the government since the early 2000s[11] as a policy to confront the nation's challenges with rapid urbanization and climate change.
The IECS has been the longest standing international conference series consisting of biennial Ecocity World Summits (EWS) and has been held in Adelaide, Australia (1992); Yoff, Senegal (1996); Curitiba, Brazil (2000); Shenzhen, China (2002); Bangalore, India (2006); San Francisco, United States (2008); Istanbul, Turkey (2009); Montreal, Canada (2011); Nantes, France (2013); Abu Dhabi, UAE (2015), Melbourne, Australia (2017); Vancouver, Canada (2019); and Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2022).
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 urban sustainability indicators and processes designed to be implemented across different contexts.
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has formulated an EcoCity concept tailored to address the unique requirements of developing countries and emerging economies.
Prominent reference examples include EcoCity Miaofeng in China, EcoNBC in Egypt, EcoGrad in St. Petersburg, Russia, UN Gigiri in Kenya, and MUF2013 in Tanzania.
[29] In addition, many cities around the world are currently struggling to maintain the status quo, with budgetary issues, low growth rates, and transportation inefficiencies, that encourage reactive, coping policies.
[30] Looking at the patterns of progress in the last few decades of city construction towards sustainability, Valaria Saiu (University of Cagliari) poses one major criticism through the existence of a theory-practice gap caused by economic and ethical conflicts and risks that generate socio-spatial utopias.
[36] As a result of this, a widespread trend has been observed in the growing number of eco-cities developed over the past two decades that claim to combat our current global climate-change challenges.
The term "Frankenstein Urbanism"[38] was used by Federico Cugurullo to metaphorically symbolize this criticism of the concept that increases social stratification in exchange for ecological security, creating isolated entities that could work perfectly within themselves, but fall apart when brought in a larger view.