Exploring neighborhood low-carbon gene based on human cognition

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the trend of global climate change has become increasingly evident. Urban carbon emission is the main factor of climate change, and low-carbon is an inevitable option. As a fundamental building block of the city, the neighbourhood is the basic space to promote the construction of a low-carbon city. Human beings endow neighbourhood with configurations and features, and human cognition of low-carbon could influence the specific participations in low-carbon behaviour, which is largely responsible for a low-carbon neighbourhood. In this study, meme theory was introduced to investigate the cognition of low-carbon stakeholders from a micro perspective of gene. We considered low-carbon cognition as a special type of meme and put forward the concept of the low-carbon gene. Moreover, we put forward the genetic analysis method combined with it. Finally, a neighbourhood in Hubei province of China was selected to illustrate this method. Our practice has proven that the neighbourhood low-carbon gene expands the adaptation of meme theory and provides a quantitative analysis method for the low-carbon stakeholders.