URBAN PLANNING AND ECO-INDUSTRIAL SETTLEMENTS.

The western economic model that took shape beginning in the industrial revolution has produced important changes in the equilibrium of ecosystems along with large-scale environmental transformation. The most common industrial processes consume materials and energy to manufacture goods and services generating a considerable amount of waste. This might be environmentally sustainable if resources were inexhaustible and space unlimited. The emissions of pollutants into the air and water, deforestation, desertification of vast regions and coastal erosion, as well as urban and infrastructural development are causes of global threats even on the urban planning scale. As a result of these circumstances, urban and regional planning saw an epistemological revision with the development of environmental planning; in other words, the environmental dimension became a factor in urban and regional planning. The topic of the environmental improvement of industrial zones is relatively new on the international scene (Fieldbook for the development of Eco-Industrial Parks, Lowe, Moran and Holmes, 1996). Only since the early 1990s in the United States, as well as in Asia and Europe, have voluntary experiments been undertaken to create industrial zones with reduced environmental impacts. The paper seeks to identify some environmental criteria that characterize eco-industrial settlements on the urban scale, which might be a more appropriate one for the correct recovery of existing areas and the design of new ones.