Livable city is the common goal for all cities. Focusing on building a harmonious livable city which is proposed recently by China's Central City Conference, this paper first analyzed the connotations of the livable city, then reviewed the main experiences in the world livable cities and put emphasis on discussing basic ideas, basic guides and key contents of the livable city construction at last. The paper aims to build China's core framework for the livable city construction and provide theoretical guidance to the livable city construction in China.
Theories on sustainable urban development keep changing with socioeconomic changes. In recent years, urban amenity has been increasingly regarded as a new urban development approach and received wide attention in West, while only few studies have been conducted in this field in China. Taking reference from existing researches in West, this article aims at filling this gap by building a customized conceptual framework based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs to fit Chinese urban development situation and help the country to improve its urban competitiveness by adopting urban amenity as a new strategy in the context of new urbanization pursuit. Based on a theoretical framework and a comprehensive index system, the article carefully evaluates the urban amenity of major cities in China, and analyzes the correlation between urban amenity and net migration as well as talents migration. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) For the four sub-categories of urban amenity, the health environment in southern cities is better than that in northern ones, and cities with high level of self-realization environment are mainly with good economic base. Little surprisingly, the recreation environment level of central China is the lowest among the three regions in the country. And the spatial layout of social atmosphere is similar with that of self-realization environment, indicating that they might have a reciprocal causation relationship; (2) The level of overall urban amenity decreases from eastern coastal region to western inland region, and cities in the highest two levels are mainly located along eastern coastal China, including Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Xiamen and Haikou. The overall urban amenity performance of Wuhan and Xi'an are the highest in central and western China respectively; (3) While there is a strong correlation between urban amenity and in-migration in general, the correlation between urban amenity and talent in-migration is stronger. Based on analyses and the findings, this article puts forward two policy implications: (I) The excessive concentration of population in big cities in China is largely the consequence of high concentration of urban amenities in these cities, therefore only through relocation and construction of high level public services in medium- and small-sized cities along with their industrial restructuring could it alleviate the overcrowding in those megacities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen; (II) Given urban amenity is critic for attracting talent, medium and small sized cities should pay more attention to consistently improving their urban amenity facilities and management, which will help them to enhance their innovation capacity and overall competitiveness in gaining high share of development in China's recent process of economic transformation from traditional industrial to innovative and knowledge-oriented economy.
Establishing a scientific and reasonable spatial pattern of urbanization, which has a significant meaning in improving the quality of urbanization and promoting the healthy development of urbanization, is the inherent requirement to advance a new type of urbanization. Based on statistical data and geographic information technology, the paper profoundly reveals the situation on spatial agglomeration during the urbanization process in China as well as the corresponding prominent contradiction, comprehensively examines the mechanism of the spatial agglomeration from the theoretical aspect, and briefly discusses the policy and suggestion of optimizing the spatial layout of urbanization. This paper argues that the spatial agglomeration during the urbanization process in China has been significant since the economic reforms and opening up policy initiated in 1978. Population, resources, elements and industries agglomerated in the eastern coastal area in large scale, forming several city clusters and densely inhabited regions. The spatial agglomeration of various elements was found to be related to many factors. To be specific, the regional difference in the natural background conditions and resources endowment is the fundamental condition while the east-oriented national development strategy and the agglomeration effect of the resource elements are the external conditions. However, the underlying impetus is increasingly widening development gap between regions. It should be noted that there is a certain historical inevitability for the agglomeration of population and industry in the eastern region. However, the scale and speed of the spatial agglomeration in relation to population and industry failed to be consistent, which result in two unharmonious problems—the mismatch of the spatial distribution of population and industry as well as the mismatch of the spatial distribution of population, industry, resources and environment. These two inharmonious problems have caused several prominent problems such as the transfer of hundreds of millions of "amphibious migratory" type of migrant workers, the cross-regional flow of energy and bulk commodities, the tremendous pressure of resources and environment in the eastern region, and the increasingly intensified instability factors and social contradictions. The essence to establish an efficient, balanced and safe spatial pattern of urbanization is to realize a regional harmonious development, not only emphasizing people's prosperity, but also highlighting the regional prosperity. There are two core strategies—"industry shift to the west" and "population shift to the east"—launched to optimize the spatial layout of urbanization.
Oasis cities are the most concentrated zones of human activity and the most vulnerable places in the arid region of northwest China. The urbanization rate rose from 15% at the beginning of the reform and opening up to 44.75% in 2013. Oasis urbanization is a typical complex giant system, featured with nonlinearity, self-organization, self-adaptability, fluctuation and feedback. Research on the mechanism of oasis urbanization is significant for the planning and construction of new-type urbanization in China's arid areas. Based on complexity theory, we analyzed the generation, evolution and transformation process of oasis urbanization, and built the theoretical framework of oasis urbanization evolution mainly from three dimensions of the emerging generation, coordinated sustenance and critical phase transition innovatively, by using proper concepts like emergence and synergism and the model of basin of attraction, according to which the Northam Curve was reinterpreted. The study indicated that: (1) Oasis city is an entire structural and functional emergence phenomenon of a human-centered oasis region system from the perspective of multiple spatial and time dimensions, and its formation conditions include generating subjects, self-organization and limited formation mechanism and environment policy. (2) Competitive and synergic mechanisms keep the vitality and evolution stability of the oasis urbanization system, which is the basic motive force of the system evolution. According to the synergetics theory and dissipative structure, we build the synergy degree and order degree of oasis urbanization evolution to recognize the evolution direction of such system. (3) Oasis urbanization process is also essentially a self-organized critical phase transition, which is the dialectical unity in the aspects of rheology and mutation, order and chaos, stability and non-stability. (4) The positive and negative feedback mechanisms in space and time improve the complexity and order of oasis urbanization, which approaches to the state of self-organized criticality; meanwhile, the vitality and diversity of urbanization system are reinforced in this process. Furthermore, the complex system models, such as multi-agent model, the complex adaptive system model, bionic calculation and social computing, will play an important role in the research of urbanization simulating and forecasting.
The planning and construction of ecological recreation spaces are important contents of urban planning and construction, and the enhancement of leisure value is an important task in the construction of urban ecological recreation spaces. By selecting comparable observation corridors in the woodland, grassland, water area with highlighted urban ecological recreation service function in Changshu city, and dynamically observing recreationists' spontaneous recreation behaviors, this study set up the method for evaluating the leisure value of urban ecological recreation space, and the evaluation indexes included leisure tendency to certain eco-space, leisure viscidity, and the adaptability of certain eco-space to recreationists. Using these evaluation indexes, the dynamic comparative analysis of the leisure values of woodland, grassland and water area was carried out. The results showed that: (1) Among the three types of ecological recreation spaces with similar acreages, water area had the highest leisure value in the whole year, followed by grassland and woodland. Woodland had the most advantages in forming better recreational environment when the external macro-conditions were not good for recreation in daylight, followed by water area and grassland. (2) In the whole year, the leisure value distributions of different ecological recreation spaces were different and mutually complementary each other. The factors like visual field, light, activity space and others weakened the leisure value of woodland in the early morning and at nightfall, but grassland and water area had certain comparative advantages in terms of these factors, and formed complementation with woodland. (3) The leisure value of woodland to the elder was most remarkable, while middle-aged people preferred water-area leisure, and the youth and children preferred grassland leisure. What's more, different aged people tended to conduct their most ecological leisure activities in their respective favorite time, which influenced the temporal distribution of the leisure value of each ecological recreation space. (4) In the construction of urban ecological recreation spaces, the mutual complementarity of different ecological recreation spaces in the aspects of recreation servicing time and serving objects should be attached more attention; the configuration scheme of different ecological recreation spaces should be made according to the areal distribution of different aged people in city; the leisure facilities should be scientifically allocated according to the differences in the leisure value of each ecological recreation space; the dynamic management measures should be implemented according to the variation of the leisure value of eco-space; and the leisure value of certain ecological recreation space should be enhanced according to the relevant influencing factors, and so on.
Climate change significantly influences regional terrestrial carbon balances. The grasslands of Inner Mongolia, located within the mid-Eurasian continental steppe zone, play an important role in the study of global change processes in the context of their particular geographical location, characterized by climatic variability and a complex natural environment. In this study, a CENTURY-based modeling system (converting the CENTURY model from a site-based model to a spatial model) was used to investigate climate change -- driven spatiotemporal variations in the vegetation net primary production (NPP) within Inner Mongolian grasslands from 1981 to 2010. Our simulation indicated that the NPP has decreased over the majority (88.62%) of the Inner Mongolian grasslands since 1981, at an average rate of 1.17 g C/m2·a over the entire area. However, there is significant decadal variability. From the 1980s to 1990s, some 69.65% of the domain experienced a reduction in the decadal average NPP, while the NPP decreased over 81.84% of the total area from the 1990s to 2000s, suggesting the worsening status of vegetation in recent decades. At the regional scale, changes in precipitation and temperature respectively accounted for 78% and 22% of the NPP decrease; however, their relative contributions were not constant across the study area or across different grassland types.
Analyzing implementing coordination and its spatial pattern of farmland consolidation in China synthetically is of great theoretical and practical value for improving land consolidation scientific decision-making. Based on the data acquired from the dataset of consolidation project management during 2006-2012, this paper analyzes the implementation status of farmland consolidation at county level by three core indices i.e., the intensity, the potential and the difficulty of farmland consolidation. Then mechanical balance model is used to build a comprehensive method for evaluating implementation coordination of farmland consolidation in China. Finally combined with the geographical spatial statistical methods, we make a quantitative analysis macroscopically on the implementation coordination of farmland consolidation in China during 2006-2012. The conclusions can be summarized as follows: (1) regions with high consolidation intensity are some traditional agricultural areas in China, high consolidation potential mainly located in semi-humid and semi-arid region, and high consolidation difficulty distributed in complex terrain region or eastern developed areas; (2) the national average of coordination variable Ftotal is 1.33, and all coordination categories have no significant difference on quantity proportion, which indicates the general coordination of farmland consolidation is in the antagonism states and its implementation is still not prominent. Implementation skewness θ is distributed in the I~VI quadrants, in the majority with transitional quadrants (II and V), and collaborative characteristic overall performance for mismatching among the intensity and potential of regional consolidation; (3) coordination variable is significant agglomeration and spatial correlation nationwide. Coupling coordination variable Ftotal and implementation skewness θ, we identify 6 categories of problem areas mainly located in northwest China, Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, where implementation status of farmland consolidation is urgent to be optimized. Aiming at the existing problem of farmland consolidation implementation, our findings suggest that differential consolidation strategy and mechanism innovation according to planning requirements should be made to further optimize the project schedule, also in view of regional natural resource conditions and socio-economic status.
In face of environmental changes at the global level, understanding vulnerability of social-ecological system has become a hotspot in sustainability research. The development of mountainous city is restricted by many key factors including terrain, construction land, and ecological risk. Since the relationship between human and natural systems is complex, analysis of urban development and environmental conservation is important and needs to be addressed. However, spatiotemporal scales in previous research are usually coarse and thus cannot provide fine information. In order to overcome this issue, we take Shangluo city, a mountainous city in Shaanxi province as an example and study an array of spatiotemporal metrics. Specifically, we first analyzed the major function oriented zone and then used 32 indices and 42 datasets to build a vulnerability evaluation system. The results show Zhashui county has a relatively low degree of vulnerability, while Luonan county has the highest vulnerability. The value of low vulnerability samples increases from 1997 to 2013, while the value of high vulnerability samples reaches the peak in 2003-2008. For entire Shangluo city, the spatial differences of vulnerability experienced an inverse U-shaped dynamic change, i.e., increasing first and then decreasing. Finally, the difference reached its minimum in 2013, which leads to an alleviation of regional differences. Under the multiple adaptive targets, Shangzhou district has the lowest vulnerability in the major development orientation, while Zhashui county, Zhen'an county, and Shangnan county are more suitable to limited development orientation. This indicates that different adaptive target orientation may have different influences on the evaluation results. In this study, the vulnerability of social-ecological system has been identified at a fine spatiotemporal scale, which could provide fine information to regional sustainable development. Moreover, the procedure of setting multiple adaptive targets can be referenced by other regions which have similar problems.
The Yangtze River Delta is a hotspot with rapid change of urban land and population agglomeration. Understanding the coordination between urban land expansion and population growth will be of great significance to optimize the allocation of land resources, regulate population flow and facilitate the implementation of new urbanization. This study analyzes the relationship between urban land expansion and population growth in the Yangtze River Delta using gravity coupling models and coordination models. Our results show that: (1) The speed of land expansion is faster than the rate of population growth, which shows significant periodic and spatial difference; (2) The coupling between land expansion and population growth generally shows a tendency of “first strengthened, then weakened and last strengthened” from 1994 to 2012, and the distance between the center of urban land gravity and population gravity was shortened, which indicates that the coordination between urban land and population growth was enhanced. The number of cities with rapid population growth has decreased, so does the coordination between land expansion and population growth, although cities of these two types show a spatial agglomeration tendency. Meanwhile, the number of cities with land expansion has increased significantly, and the distribution has showed a trend of expansion. The results demonstrate that there is no high level of coordination between land expansion and population growth. (3) Economic development, changes in industrial structure and zone bit, transportation development and government policy may have contributed to urban land expansion and population growth as well as to their coupling relationship.
Henan province, located in central region, is China's third most populous province. Based on the sixth population census data at township level, this article analyzes the features and trends of population distribution in Henan province by the geological statistics method, and discusses the factors influencing this distribution. The results are as follows: (1) Spatial scale is a basic parameter to study population distribution issue. The actual situation of population distribution will be expressed accurately when small spatial units are used. (2) The Lorenz curve is generated by the 1955 township-level units. There is 10% of the total population in 35.1% of the total land area with low density, and 36.2% of the population in 10% of the area with high density. (3) The exponential model has the best fitting effect for the variation function. When the distance is within 80 km, the variation functions have similar trends in the four directions of east-west, north-south, northeast-southwest, and northwest-southeast. The anisotropies enhances when the distance is over 80 km. The r(h) is the highest in the east-west direction. (4) The population density has the strongest homogeneity and the smallest variation in north-south direction, and the most obvious variation in east-west direction. (5) The interpolation results represent intuitively the gradient change process of population density. The population distribution of Henan province could be divided into three types: sparsely populated area in mountainous areas, medium density area in rural plains and basins, and densely populated area in urban areas. There is a dividing line of population density from Luoyang city, Pingdingshan city, Zhumadian city to Huaibin county in northwest-southeast direction. To the northeast of the line is densely populated region whereas to the southwest of the line is sparsely populated, which indicates the macro pattern of population distribution in this province. Two kinds of terrain condition (mountains and plains) are the basic factor influencing the population spatial pattern. The level of land reclamation is mainly constrained by the terrain condition, while population density depends on the level of land reclamation. High density in urban regions is the results of the interaction of the superior geographical condition and socioeconomic development. In the rapid urbanization process, it is significant to realize the orderly population movement and reasonable spatial redistribution through implementing the Major Function Oriented Zoning and the New Urbanization Strategy. To create favorable conditions for living and working are in favor of population gathering. We should mitigate negative effects of population redistribution on resources and environment, and seek a green development way.
Carrying capacity of urban economy is based on the concept of sustainable development. It refers to the capability of the enormous system of a given urban economy to carry the largest scale of economy when the urban economy develops to its full potential within the limits of resource conditions and environmental capacity. From the point of view of economy, economic carrying capacity takes into account both the consistency of the developing level and developing speed and the consistency of economic development and social progress. Using the Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) and statistical global trend analysis, we analyze the spatial pattern of economic carrying capacity of 288 cities at prefecture level and above in China, based on which the driving path and enhancement strategy of urban economic carrying capacity are concluded. Through the analysis of the spatial pattern differentiation of urban economic carrying capacity, the study proposes some suggestions for urban construction adjustment. According to the analysis, spatial distribution pattern of urban economic carrying capacity of the cities at prefecture level and above in China shows the following features: ① The spatial distribution of urban economic carrying capacity demonstrates a tendency of gradually descending following the three geographical regions of the East, the Middle and the West. And the high-to-low decreasing rates of the cities' scores show a trend of fast-slow-fast. ② Spatial distribution of the carrying capacity of urban economies is characterized by a weak positive spatial autocorrelation. There are many H-H types in the hot regions, while the H-L and L-H types are present in cold regions mostly. The heat decreases gradually from the southeast coastal region to the northwest inland region. ③ There are spatial disparities of the urban economic carrying capacity between the East and the West, while there are disparities of economic development between the South and the North. And the development stages from backward to advanced are in accordance with the spatial pattern of the East, the Middle and the West. ④There are three main ways to improve the urban economic carrying capacity, that is, the driving path of resource environment, driving path of economy & society and the driving path of policy and talent. In addition, economic location, talented personnel, the environment and the infrastructure are the factors that influence urban economic carrying capacity. The measures to improve urban economic carrying capacity are as follows, optimizing resource utilization and environmental protection, developing transportation industry, encouraging outside capital investment in the urban economy, and actively integrating into the national economy and regional development strategy.
Self-organization of urban spatial structure is an underlying mechanism of urban development. The correct understanding of self-organizing mechanism and effective compounding of the spatial planning effect is crucial to reasonable urban expansion, especially in the rapid process of urbanization in current China. This paper illustrates the basic mechanism of urban spatial expansion by establishing the logistic model, then quantitatively interprets the characteristics of continuity and complexity which are guided by the "planar" spatial planning and "linear" traffic infrastructure planning. The former is characterized by the laws of regional preferential development and adjacent built-up area expansion, and the latter is presented as a pattern of unexpected urban spatial expansion. Based on this assumption, the same model is applied in the whole study area, urban planning construction area and non-urban planning construction area respectively, which further reveals the mandatory control function on urban spatial extension by "planar" spatial planning and the guiding role of "point-like" and "linear" traffic construction planning. Therefore, the "planar" spatial planning should be analyzed scientifically, in order to effectively prevent planning failure and guide the resonable urban growth. What's more, the self-organization mechanism of urban space should be established, and the comprehensive control scheme would be put forward based on bottom-up traffic infrastructure planning and top-down "planar" spatial planning.
The integration of space and time generates much closer interaction between geography and other social sciences, and provides a new perspective for understanding the role of geography in tourist flow distribution. China has become one of the world's most popular tourist destinations. However, there are significant disparities in volume and structure of China's international tourist flow between the coastland and inland. Tourism behavior involves the cross-regional movement at spatio-temporal dimension. Accordingly, an insight into spatial-temporal distribution and inter-regional co-opetition relationships is very helpful to develop destination marketing strategy. Based on the perspective of space-time interaction, this paper explored the inter-provincial inequality of international tourist flow in China from 1997 to 2013. LISA time path, space-time transition and visualization were employed for spatial-temporal data analysis. It concludes that: ① the polarization effects of the main port cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou) tend to be weaken, and along with the rise of new growth poles located in the central and western regions, inter-provincial inequality tend to be reduced. ② The spatial distribution of international tourist flow obeys to the distance-decay rule-the short-range international tourist market is more spatially concentrated than the long-haul market. ③ The local spatial structure of European market is simplest, Southeast Asian market is the most complex. Space-time dependence effect has the greatest impact on the dynamic of regional system of North-American market; the Japanese-Korean market is of the least influence. The inter-provincial growth of inner Yangtze River Delta shows a significant space-time dependence, but the space-time dependence of Beijing and her neighbors, Guangdong and her neighbors are rather faint, in spite of the two provinces' own high growth rate; the local spatial structures of these backward provinces situated in the central and western regions are stable due to their slower growth rate. ④ The inter-provincial collaborative growth is the main theme of Chinese international tourism development. However, the situation of co-opetition varies from one province to another. ⑤ There exists an intense spatial cohesion among provinces, and their own market roles are relatively stable; Space-time transition probability varies from one province to another and from one market to another. Some suggestions are made to promote regional balanced development, such as continuing to increase supports for backward provinces; breaking administrative barriers for the circulation of tourism factors; necessitating the cooperation between touristic backward and advanced provinces as well as self-improvement of the formers; cultivating and strengthening the booming tourism growth poles located in the central and western regions; making more efforts to the advertising & marketing for the long-haul market.
In the traditional sense, one main objective of the religious tourism is to worship with its profound cultural and religious significance for those tourists who have religious beliefs. For the other people, sacred religious spots are of great significance and attractiveness to them from three aspects, viz. profound religious culture, religious architecture with a long history, and cultural and religious relics. On the basis of the entropy method and AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and fuzzy evaluation, we comprehensively assess tourist resources of religious spots in Jiangxi province from five aspects, viz. feature, scale, grade quality, optimum period and market awareness. In addition, we estimate the development suitability of religious spots from four aspects, viz. resources endowment, towns based, traffic accessibility and economic infrastructure. According to the evaluation subsystem, those religious spots chosen in the present study are classified into four groups, viz. highest suitability, higher real suitability, higher potential suitability and low suitability. The other findings are as follows. Historical and cultural values, singularity, aestheticism and popularity are the core elements to determine the tourism resources values of religious spots in Jiangxi. In addition, the class-quality distribution of the religious spots in this province is pyramid-structured, in which most places are still characterized by the higher potential suitability and low suitability. Besides, the "ring of Poyang Lake religious tourism" is urgently needed to optimize the structure of the grade, with the special development policies in Poyang Lake ecological economic zone. The distinction between the conclusion of our study and previous studies indicates that insufficient resources endowment is the common issue of religious spots tourism development in China. In addition, this paper overcomes the problem of the possibility of high subjectivity in AHP method when assessing the weights of indicators and greater different timing distances to religious spots in different traffic modes. To some extent, it carries out the quantitative evaluation of the tourism development suitability, and then puts forward corresponding development suggestions to different suitability places.
Tourists' loyalty to destinations has been an important topic in the tourism research field recently. However, preivous studies have paid less attention to the influence of the emotional elements on tourists' behaviors. This study employs Bagozzi's self-regulation attitude theory to propose and investigate a new conceptual model to depict the relationship among destination service quality, overall satisfaction, place attachment and destination loyalty. The city of Xiamen is chosen as the study site, which is the famous coastal tourist destination in China. The results are shown as follows: (1) There are three dimensionalitities of tourists' perception of urban service, including hospitality service, attraction service and public service. (2) tourists' perception of public service has the greatest influence on saisfaction, followed by attraction service, while the influence of hospitality service on satisfaction is not significant. Especially, the convience of leisure facilities and information consultation has made greater contribution to the public service. (3) Overall satisfaction is an antecedent of tourist loyalty while partially mediating the effect of place attachment. (4) As for the two dimensions of place attachement, the influence of place dependence has greater infuence on tourists' loyal behaviors. Therefore, this study not only empirically demonstrates the path "tourists' service perception→overall satisfaction→place attachment→loyalty", but also supports the suitability to the destination field of Bagozzi's self-regulation attitude theory with regard to the appraisal, affective and behavior sequence. The findings offer important implications for the destination marketing practice. Destination managers should focus on improving destination service quality thoroughly, administrating the destination attraction effectively, paying more attention to emotion management and cultivating tourists' destination attachment.
