The Belt and Road Initiative is the greatest project aimed to improve global governance in human history ever before. It opens a new era for the research of political geography, and in particular it provides great opportunities for geo-relation research. Geography is a science that explores the surface of earth from three perspectives including the time, space and nature-society system, which equips it to undertake geo-relation research with unique tools and advantages. The Belt and Road Initiative is one of the most challenging scientific and policy issues in the world. To better study the Belt and Road Initiative from the geo-relation perspective, geographers need to make combinations in the following four ways: (1) combining reductionism and system theory in scientific thoughts; (2) combining data of both human-society and nature-environment; (3) combining research questions based on social, human, political and natural processes; (4) combining research methods on empirical, positivism, systematic, and big data. Chinese Geographers need to give considerations to balance the development of political geography, multi-discipline oriented research on geo-relations and the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative globally.
The application of a geographical perspective in the development of representative national level spatial models of governance in China constitutes a gap in the literature. The purpose of this study was to address this gap through a spatial analysis of the outcomes of numerous regional projects aimed at establishing a "typical" model of national governance. National garden cities in China were considered as illustrative case studies for developing this model. Three points in time were selected based on macro-level and micro-level analyses of the development histories and characteristic patterns of national garden cities and the evolution of policies to support their development. Using a range of methods that included grid dimension and coefficient of concentration measurements, kernel density estimation, ESDA and overlay analysis, matrix analysis, and PPCC, this study investigated the multidimensional characteristics and the influence mechanism of the spatio-temporal evolution of national garden cities in China. The following findings emerged from the study. First, national garden cities have undergone three stages in their evolution: construction and exploration, ecological development, and adjustments to improve their livability. Second, an examination of their structural characteristics indicated greater complexity and a trend reflecting an increasingly concentrated distribution relating to their fractal situation. Third, their distribution pattern was found to be strongly associated with China's physical and geographical divisions. Moreover, their distribution was closely correlated with the "Hu Line", demonstrating "dense in the southeast and sparse in the northwest" characteristics that have remained largely constant. Fourth, there has been a global autocorrelation relating to the pattern of association that indicates significant changes in hotspot and coldspot areas. Last, the findings revealed that interactions between factors such as hydrothermal climatic conditions, historical garden resources, urban development status, regionally differentiated levels of economic development, departmental reviews and management, and the degree of attention of local governments constituted the impact mechanism driving the evolution of China's national garden cities.
Land use and land-cover change has received great attention from scientists all over the world for a long time. In particular, studying the spatial-temporal characteristics of urban construction land and orienting the urban function accordingly is significant for promoting urban sustainable and scientific development. This paper focused on the urban construction land of 13 cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region during 1985-2015 and analyzed their spatial-temporal characteristics by both quantitative and qualitative methods. Then, the driving factors of differentiation on temporal evolution and spatial pattern of urban construction land were detected by multiple linear regression, path analysis and geographic detector method. Based on the dominant mechanism of driving factors, function orientation of urban development in the study region was proposed. The major results were showed as follows. First, there were obvious spatial differences of expansion, speed, direction and stability of urban construction land, and the 13 cities can be divided into stable and coordinated type, fluctuant and coordinated type, stable and uncoordinated type, fluctuant and uncoordinated type.Second, the main driving factors of the temporal evolution of urban construction land in this region included GDP index, population density, and financial income index, while the dominant factors of spatial evolution of urban construction land included distance to the city center, distance to the main river, and distance to the main highway. Finally, according to these results, the 13 cities were accurately and scientifically divided into the core economic leading cities, key economic development cities, and economic stable and conservation cities, which provide some references for the coordinated and integrated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
Industrial production space is an important part of urban space. This paper is concerned with the projection of industrial production and industrial sectors in urban space. With the rapid urbanization and industrialization, disorderly sprawl, environmental pollution and other problems have emerged in the industrial production space. Resultant problems and contradictions exist widely. So how to optimize industrial production space layout and transform the industry to achieve the sustainable development has become an urgent task. The Pearl River Delta (PRD), located in the forefront of reform and opening up, is the national optimizing development zone, and its urbanization and industrialization are very typical. Since the implementation of China's economic reform and opening up policy in 1978, the PRD has become one of the most important world manufacturing bases as well as one of the most developed regions in China. However, the rapid industrialization of the PRD is at the cost of huge resource consumption and environmental pollution. The industrial production space in the PRD changes rapidly and also urgently needs to be optimized. In this context, understanding the spatial-temporal patterns and driving forces of industrial space expansion is important to informed land use planning and sustainable development. Based on the satellite images data and GIS, accurately extracting the information of industrial production space in Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration form 1990 to 2014, this article analyzed the expansion patterns and characteristics of industrial production space in the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration, with the help of expansion speed and intensity index, fractal dimensions, compactness index as well as spatial association model, and then revealed its driving mechanisms. The conclusions can be drawn as follows. Firstly, since the 1990s, industrial production spaces in the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration have extended form core area to peripheral area and the industrial production space scale of PRD has extended about 16 times in 25 years. The pattern of extended hot spot areas evolved constantly and the central polarization of hot spot areas weakens gradually. Secondly, the morphologic change of industrial production spaces in the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration had phases and differences. Before 2007, the fractal dimension of industrial production space increased but compactness index decreased. This indicated that the shape of industrial production space tended to be more complex and fragmented, and the area of industrial production space increased mainly in the way of external expansion. After 2007, the fractal dimension decreased but compactness index increased a little. This indicated that the shape of industrial production space tended to be simple and regular, and the area of industrial production space increased mainly in the way of peripheral filling. Finally, the driving forces varied in different development stages. Policy factors, economic globalization, regional urbanization and technical progress and innovation dominated the evolution of industrial production space in the PRD.
Against the backdrop of the new normal, "coordination development of five modernizations" is a necessary choice for building China's modernization. The thesis utilizes the method of multi-index comprehensive method, coupling coordination degree model, variable intercept model, builds an assessing index system for a coordinated development of "Five Modernizations" by selecting indexes from perspectives of such as new industrialization, informatization, new urbanization, agricultural modernization, and greenization, and explores the changes of the "Five Modernizations" coordinated development in 40 prefecture-level cities in Northeast China during 1993-2013, a period when developments of the region are facilitated. Results are as follows: despite that the "five factors" coordinated development in Northeast China has still been in an underdeveloped and imbalanced state, it enjoys a prominent increasing trend, with apparent time stages and regional differences. The region's development can be categorized into three stages: 1993-2002, the fluctuation period, 2003-2008, the increasing period, and 2009-2013, the steady period. In terms of areas, there are the slightly imbalanced areas along the Harbin-Dalian Railway, moderately imbalanced areas with central and western parts of Heilongjiang province, western Jilin province and most parts of Liaoning province as major representatives, and severely imbalanced areas like northwestern and eastern Heilongjiang and eastern Mongolia. Subsystems inside the "Five Modernizations" coordination vary from their manifestations, which are ranked as follows according to their differentials: agricultural modernization > informatization > greenization > new urbanization > new industrialization. From the angle of the influencing mechanism, investments of education, technology and agriculture have positive effect on the coordination development "Five Modernizations"; on the other hand, the industrial level and development degree influence its development in a negative way, and openness, and capital and governance investments are found to have implicit impact on the coordination.
Global space is the internal spatial performance, status, and results of urban economy, society and living globalization, and it is also a spatial issue concerning the new phase of the development of Chinese metropolises. The research of its mechanism is conducive to understand the interactive relationship between endogenous factors and exogenous factors in the process of urban development in the era of globalization, especially, the interaction between transnational elements and institutional reforms. Based on the theory of production of space, the relationship of transnational elements, institution unbinding and production of global space has been studied in this paper to analyze the mechanism mode of state power, local government and transnational capital in the production of global space, taking Tianhebei in Guangzhou as a case. The data have been collected through the mutual support method of field trip, questionnaire survey, in-depth interview and online public opinion. There are three main conclusions obtained as follows: (1) Transnational capital of Tianhebei's global space is involved in the process of progressive institution reform promoted by the state government, and formed a 'management, coordinate and collaboration' correlation with the government, which is a mode for production of space of national globalism. (2) The cultural symbol of Tianhebei global consumerism has been generated by festivals, major events, and transnational professional class, which lead to the transnational social production of space. (3) The global space of Tianhebei has been through several spatial reconstructions including delocalization, transnationalization, globalization and relocalization. These reconstructions are not only a process of political production of space, but also instrumental production of space.
Urban housing price and its spatial differentiation has been a hot issue that has aroused the sustained attention of urban geographers since the beginning of this century. The present research covers 135 districts and counties in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD). The dependent variable used is the average price per square meter of commercial housing. 16 factors that affect housing price are used as independent variables. To arrive at the findings, the Theil index, stepwise regression and geographically weighted regression have been used. The findings are as follows: (1) The difference in the price of commercial housing between districts and counties in the YRD has been increasing from 2014 to 2016, and the difference in housing prices between the districts and counties with very expensive and very cheap housing has increased to more than 10 times; (2) Seven factors have the largest impact on housing price differentiation, namely: university and college resources, economic density, real estate policy, economic strength, investment in public services, the proportion of high-end practitioners and industrial structure; (3) The impact of the explanatory indicators shows significant spatial instability in the region. Based on these findings, this paper proposes that housing price is a monetized expression of the abundance of urban economy, human resources, social and administrative resources, etc., while regional housing price differentiation is a comprehensive reflection of the differences in the ability of cities to dominate resources, among which administrative resources play a leading role. Therefore, even if integrated development makes up the per capita economic index, the income level of residents in the YRD Region and the basic public services therein tend to play a similar role in the region. The significant differences in the ability of cities to gather scarce resources mean that it is relatively difficult for the housing prices of districts and counties in the YRD Region to achieve "club convergence" in the near term and the housing price differences between the core cites (Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, etc.) and other cities will continue to increase.
Population aging is an important problem in the world in the 21st century. China faces a series of challenges caused by rapid population aging. Changes of the spatial distribution of population aging will pose higher requirements for dynamic public facility and service allocation systems in metropolises, thus understanding the spatial differentiation of population aging will better help us formulate urban planning and public policies to meet the spatial need of the elderly. As the pioneer of China's reform and opening-up policy, Guangzhou faces increasingly serious problems of population aging. Using the fifth and the sixth census datasets of the neighborhood (Jiedao in Chinese) level, this paper firstly analyses the spatial distribution characteristics of population aging in Guangzhou city by GIS spatial analysis in 2010, and finds the difference of the central city to the periphery in a "circle & fan" shape. Besides, the factorial ecological analysis and cluster analysis are utilized to reveal the social spatial characteristics and classify the types of the social area of the aged respectively. In addition to that, both results mentioned above are overlaid to analyze the spatial differentiation of population aging in Guangzhou, and this paper categorizes it into 8 types: old city of Senile Late stage, enterprise units of Senile Midterm stage, institutional units of Senile Midterm stage, traditional rural township of Senile Initial stage, mixed residential block of Senile Initial stage, mixed residential block of the adult type, educational and scientific research units of the adult type as well as new district of the young type. Compared with the spatial differentiation of population aging in 2000, the paper finds out that the main factors in social spatial structure and the social spatial types of old population have significantly changed during the past 10 years, and the changes of spatial types of population aging in this city have its historical inheritance. Besides, the structure becomes more complicated with type renewal and changes of the typical areas' scale occurring with the urban development. The patterns of spatial differentiation of population aging in Guangzhou could be divided into four types, i.e. continuous development in old town, renewal transformation in the city center, sharp transition in the suburbs, and differentiation development in the outer-suburbs. Lastly, this paper discusses the formation mechanism of the spatial differentiation of population aging in Guangzhou: the city's historical basis, urban planning and construction guidance, the influence of housing system's changes, and the real estate development all play their roles in the formation of the spatial differentiation of population aging in Guangzhou, but the influence of the factors varies.
The rapid population aging is coming along with the urban expansion in Beijing in recent decades. During the urbanization process, many older people have moved from the inner urban area to the newly developed urban areas in Beijing. Older people's living environment has dramatically changed. Moreover, elder care has become an important issue in the society. This study aims to understand older people's willingness to relocation and examine various factors which affect their willingness to relocation. This quantitative analysis is based on the data from 353 valid questionnaires which were collected from the older people aged 60 and over in four residential quarters. The four sampled residential quarters were all built after 2000 in the Urban Function Extension Area of Beijing. Descriptive analysis and binary Logistic regression were applied in this study. The results showed that 252 older people (71.4% of all the samples) were willing to move. In terms of the reasons for relocation, moving closer to or moving into their adult children's families and taking care of their grandchildren were the main reasons for the older people's voluntary relocation. Moreover, the changes of life course played an important role in the older people's migration behavior. The regression results showed that participants with better health status (OR=1.53, P=0.094), higher income (OR=2.05, P=0.015), who were strongly influenced by the living distance with their adult children (OR=1.23, P=0.020), having access to elevators after the relocation (OR=1.29, P=0.062), and perceiving the green space important (OR=1.56, P=0.005) were more willing to move. The construction of age-friendly community should meet the demands for various groups of older people. The findings of this study contribute to understanding the moving behaviors of older people in the process of urban development in Beijing, and it also sheds light on future studies on healthy living environment for older people to age in place.
Given the seeming inevitability of social and environmental change, there is renewed interest, both from scientific and policy perspectives, in the ability of both greater society and communities in particular to cope with and positively adapt to crisis and change. Resilience thinking has emerged in recent years as a new sustainable development paradigm for providing novel perspectives on community development in the rapidly changing world. A thorough understanding of the influencing factors and mechanism of community resilience in tourism destinations following a disaster provides useful insights into the sustainable development of tourism destinations. Based on existing literature, a conceptual model depicting the relationships among community resilience, place attachment, occupational identity, community participation, community empowerment, and social capital is proposed and empirically examined with case studies of Dujiangyan and Jiuzhaigou in Sichuan Province. The empirical findings are as follows. First, place attachment, occupational identity, community participation, community empowerment, and social capital all have significant positive influence on community resilience in tourism destinations. Community participation is most influential among these, followed by occupational identity, social capital, community empowerment, and place attachment. Second, two paths were found in the impact mechanism between community participation and community resilience in tourism destinations: (1) directly and (2) indirectly mediated by community empowerment and social capital. Finally, the present study presents a theoretical framework designed to describe the mechanism of community resilience in tourism destinations.
Exploring the spatial layout of service industries in new urban districts is significant for guiding the planning of these districts and optimizing the spatial layout of service industries. This study examined the overall and sub-industry spatial distribution of service industries in Zhengdong New District, Zhengzhou, Henan province, China. An analysis was carried out using points of interest (POI) data (Big Data closely related to human-economic geography) and the Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithm in MATLAB and ArcGIS. The main findings from this research were: (1) In terms of the overall spatial layout, the clusters showed an obvious "414" spatial hierarchy and the regions with these clusters had better accessibility. Most clusters were located in only one functional area, but some others were located in two or more functional areas. The distribution of noise points was relatively scattered and isolated from the potential regions of service industry agglomeration in future. The effect of spatial proximity, administrative drivers and market orientation led to the apparent spatial polarization of service industries, which were centered in the lower left corner of a diagonal from the northwest to the southeast of Zhengdong New District. Future urban planning should target the construction of 'multi-clustering centers' to avoid excessive clustering of service industries (especially low-level service industries) in the CBD and residential/commercial logistics areas, and to avoid increasing the pressure on population, transportation, resources and the environment in these two functional areas. (2) The analysis by sub-industry showed that some industries had differences in the distribution of spatial nodes, although the CBD and residential/commercial logistics areas were the gathering points of spatial nodes for all industries. Some industries showed features of coincidence and dislocation between the spatial nodes and the location of functional areas. From the planning point of view, the positioning of each functional area should be clearly differentiated, the overlap of service industries should be avoided, and the location of each sub-industry should be considered carefully. In the end, the paper proposed the optimization of the industrial structure of functional areas, which provides the basis for improving the spatial structure of service industries in Zhengdong New District.
Zoning the ecological redline is a key for the regional eological security shelters' construcation and social-economic sustainable development. Since water resources shortage is an overriding factor threatening ecological security in arid and semiarid regions, zoning the ecological redline should be based on the security of regional water supply in these regions. In this paper, taking Yulin city (a pilot of the integrated multi-planning) as an example, we proposed a method for zoning the ecological redline by assessing the key ecosystem services and ecological sensitivity with the consideration of water resouces constraints. The results indicated that: (1) the area of ecological redline was 16998.59 km2, covering 39.60% of the territory of Yulin city. The area of redline in water conservation was 5147.15 km2, in which the upstream of watersheds in Tuwei River, Yuxi River, Luhe River and Wuding River were the core regions of water supply with an total amount of 34.57×107 m3 water producation per year. About 12.38% of loess area and 23.25% of sandy area contributed more than half of the ecological services of soil and water conservation and sand fixation, repectively, which indicates the importances of these two areas in Yulin city. (2) Sand area in the northwest of Yulin city covered multiple redlines, including water conservation, sand fixation, biodiversity conservation and forbidden development zones, while the loess hilly area in the south covered only the redline of soil conservation. This means that the sandy area may play a more important role in the protection of the regional ecological security of Yulin city compared with the loess hilly area. This study provided a scientific basis for solving the conflicts effectively among various types of planning as well as a theoretical framewok in zoning the ecological redline in other arid and semiarid regions.
Heilongjiang reclamation area has become one of the major commodity grain bases in China, in the context of spatial distribution pattern shifted from "grain supply from north to south" to "grain supply from south to north" in the country. Therefore, it is essential to stabilize grain output and make it sustainable in this base so as to ensure Chinese food security, and research on impact factors of grain yield is among the focuses for the agricultural policy. Twenty-three factors, which are most closely related with agricultural production, are selected from 113 farms in the area, and be imported into Geographical Detector to analyze different influences of them on the grain out. These factors include population density, cultivated area, year-end population, employment in primary industry, total investment in agriculture, payment to employed persons, total savings deposit, net per capita income, classified highway, number of home computers, total power of farm machinery, machinery tilled land area each year, machinery sown area each year, effective irrigation area, fertilizer input, electricity used in agriculture, grain storage, the number of grain processing center, the processing speed of grain processing center, crops acreage sown, annual average temperature, annual average precipitation, and hours of sunshine. Results showed that the six most important impact factors were sown area, cultivated area, machinery tilled land area each year, machinery sown area each year, consumption of chemical fertilizers, and total power of farm machinery. As agricultural machinery level played an important role in grain production of farms in the area, influences of 15 different agricultural machines are furtherly analyzed, which indicated that the five most important ones were combined harvesters, complementary mechanization to large and medium agricultural tractors, self-driven combine, large and medium agricultural tractors, and self-driven rice planter. So there is a significant demand for increasing investment in agricultural technological research, and mechanization, and developing precision agriculture in the area.
Urban spatial expansion is one of the important indexes that measures the progress of urbanization in the context of new urbanization, and is also of great significance to research on sustainable development of resource-exhausted cities. Firstly, with advanced remote sensing and GIS technologies, the area of building lands in Huaibei in 1992, 1997, 2002, 2007, 2011 and 2016 was extracted by using remote-sensing index-based built-up index (IBI). During the extraction, the data source was multi-temporal Landsat series remote-sensing images. Assistance was provided to Matlab to complete the delimitation and automatic extraction of boundaries of built-up areas (BUAs) in Huaibei. In the research region, the building area increased by 116.55 km2 (by 8.54 times) from 13.64 km2 to 130.19 km2 throughout the study period. Furthermore, spatial and temporal characteristic measurement indexes, such as intensity of urbanization, elastic coefficient of expansion, focuses and compactness index, were selected to reveal the spatial and temporal evolution of building lands in the study area in recent 25 years. The results indicate that the overall intensity of urbanization is moderate, and the intensity of urban expansion is high in the research period; elastic coefficient of expansion indicates that urban land utilization is not highly intensive in the region under research, and man-land relationships develop uncoordinatedly; with respect to changes in BUAs in the research period, the focuses are mainly in the east and relatively concentrated; with the acceleration of reform and opening up and the planning and establishment of economic and technological development zones, compactness of land utilization is gradually decreased in BUAs. Finally, driving and influencing factors of urban spatial expansion were further analyzed from perspectives of economic development, population, policy planning, means of transportation and mining collapse. The results indicate that economy and population, government decision-making (planning), level of transportation and mining collapse zones are driving, guiding, endogenous and restriction mechanisms of urban spatial expansion in Huaibei respectively.
Urban expansion modeling from the perspective of land supply is an effective supplement to the research field of urban expansion simulation. A recent progress in this field is the urban expansion ecological resistance surface model, which improves the classical minimum cumulative resistance model by incorporating absolute ecological constraints and multi-level expansion sources. In this study, the urban expansion ecological resistance surface model is further incorporated with two types of spatial locational conditions, i.e. the inter-city spatial interaction and road condition. In this way, the impacts of the spatial locational conditions on urban expansion can be integrated into the simulation. The model is applied in a case study of the county seat and surrounding area of Manas county in Xinjiang. The results show that the improved urban expansion ecological resistance surface model performs well in empirical application. The results reflect the comprehensive impacts of the driving forces, resistance forces, and external attraction forces on urban expansion. The improved model proves to be a scientific method for urban expansion simulation from the perspective of land supply.
The analysis of the nonlinear trends and non-stationary oscillations of high temperatures and heatwaves in Xi'an, based on 8 extreme high temperature indices, is performed using homogenized temperature dataset over the period of 1960-2016. Temporal trends and their impact factors are evaluated by climate diagnosis methods including extreme-point symmetric mode decomposition (ESMD) and correlation analysis.The effect of air-sea anomalies such as El Ni?o and West Pacific Subtropical High (WPSH) to extreme high temperatures are explored. The results are as follows: (1) Using the in-homogeneity dataset, the warming trends of warm nights, summer days, hot nights, and heatwaves are underes- timated, the downtrend in the heating energy consumption and the uptrend in the cooling energy consumption are overestimated; while the trend change of warm days and high temperature days are affected little by in-homogeneity data. (2) Meanwhile, warm days, heatwaves, high temperature days and cooling degree days, reflecting the characteristics of extreme high temperatures in the daytime, show the fluctuations of decrease-increase-decrease-increase; warm nights and hot nights, which describe the features of extreme high temperatures in the nighttime, exhibit the low stationary fluctuation before 1993 and high stable fluctuation afterwards; (3) With regards to influencing factors, sea surface temperature anomaly in the Ni?o 4 region is closely related to high temperatures in Xi'an. When sea surface temperature in the Ni?o 4 region is high abnormally, warm days, summer days and cooling energy consumption increase significantly whereas heating energy consumption decreases obviously. When the intensity of WPSH increases and its control area enlarges, with its ridge point expanding westward, warm nights, summer days and hot days increase obviously, while heating energy consumption decreases.
Subalpine lakes are important reserves of biodiversity and freshwater resource, and their unique ecosystems are responsive to environmental changes. Yunzhong Lake, a subalpine reservoir located in the Jiugong Mountains (southeast Hubei province), provides important ecosystem services of tourism, water supply, irrigation and electricity generation. However, the lake has suffered environmental degradation (e.g., algal bloom) since 2000, resulting from wastewater input from local tourist hotels. In order to reveal the response of aquatic biota to anthropogenic and climatic disturbances, multi-proxy analysis (element content, particle size and diatom) and 210Pb dating were applied on a 27-cm length core collected from Yunzhong Lake. The results revealed that sedimentary diatom assemblages were co-dominated by planktonic forms (Aulacoseira and Cyclotella) and benthic forms (Achnanthes and Fragilaria). The results of redundancy analysis (RDA) revealed that sedimentary diatom assemblages of Yunzhong Lake were significantly related to sedimentary elements (i.e., Al, Fe and Pb) and temperature. The cluster analysis of diatom assemblages showed that environmental changes in Yunzhong Lake had experienced two major phases. During the early period after the damming between 1958 and 1993, high abundances of the species preferring alkaline water (i.e., Achnanthes minutissima and Fragilaria nanana) and relatively high values in chemical index of alteration (CIA) mainly responded to strong weathering in the catchment. After 1993, climate warming and nutrient enrichment induced by the development of tourism were two main driving forces of the proliferation of mesotrophic and eutrophic species, such as Cyclotella pseudostelligera and Aulacoseira alpigena. This study reconstructed the evolution of the subalpine lake ecosystem under the combined effects of climate change and human activities. The results can provide baseline information for eco-environmental protection of subalpine lakes and the restoration of water quality in the watershed.
