Inter-city cooperation in the Yangtze River Delta region is a new phenomenon and has received much governmental and scholarly attention in recent years. This paper examines inter-city cooperation from partnership perspective. In this study, three typical cases of inter-city cooperation, Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou Urban Region Planning, the Forum for the Coordination of Urban Economy of Yangtze River Delta Region and Jiangyin Economic Development Zone in Jingjiang are selected to examine three types of partnership arrangements, namely, hierarchical partnership, spontaneous partnership and hybrid partnership. This research applies the partnership approach to regional scale based on the Yangtze River delta's experiences. The research focus of this paper is the effectiveness of three types of inter-city cooperation. Through tracing the process of partnership formation and investigating stakeholder interactions, this paper argues that the effectiveness of inter-city cooperation depends on cooperation mechanism, the process of cooperation, the nature and scope of the cooperation, and the partner selection and roles of actors in partnership formation.
The urban function is the drive of urban population growth. Based on the calculation of the basic part of urban function, using the Economic Base Theory model, this paper discusses the relationship between Central Place Function, Management Function, Industrial Function, Gateway Function and temporal variation of urban population in Shandong Province in 1982 and 2000. The following conclusions are drawn. Firstly, Central Place Function/Industrial Function and Management Function/Industrial Function are the most important factors leading to the differences of urban population in 1982 and 2000 respectively. In the process of gateway opening (or closing), Gateway Function can enhance (or weaken) Industrial Function and Management Function. Secondly, the fluctuations of Industrial Function and Gateway Function are the important factors that influence the variation of urban population in 1982-2000. With the increase of urban population size, the expansion of Industrial Function can no longer be the impetus to the urban population growth. The positive correlation between Gateway Function and the variation of urban population reflects the strong drive brought by the gateway opening that makes population grow.
Population, resource, environment and development (PRED) is a focus question of human-earth relationship and an everlasting subject of geographic research. The theory of synergism of five rules in PRED and conceptual mathematical model of PRED evolution trajectory were analyzed, then the controlling macro-model of integration of six factors and its grey index assessment system in bay area were proposed whereby. Also the regulation programs for PRED of bay area evolved in a well-ordered way was devised. The synergism of five rules, refers to the coupling of natural rule, social rule, economic rule, environmental rule and technical rule. The integration of six factors means organizing of ecotype, safety, health, landscaping, culture and profit. The reciprocity of synergism of five rules and integration of six factors is interdependent. Take the Xiamen Bay as an example. The city of Xiamen has reached a highly developed stage, whose first industry has nearly been replaced by the secondary and tertiary industries, but oceanic species like Chinese dolphin, lancelet, etc. and mangrove wetland were preserved. The grey assessment result of integration of six factors is 75.725, indicating that main limiting factors of PRED in the Xiamen Bay are artificial coastline, seawater pollution and shipping channel siltation. The focus of PRED regulation should be: protect coastal eco-source, prevent port and shipping channel from silting, curtail pollution from land, improve landscape of coastline and islands, keep the predominance of sea transportation industry and travel industry and expand to new & high-tech oceanic industries. The study shows that the theory of synergism of five rules and integration of six factors brings a general idea and oriental guide for PRED in bay area, and planning foreseeingly on resource utilization and environmental protection is an exercisable controlling means. Based on the continually comparison and adjustment of six factors among several representative bays, each factor of PRED will keep in a well-ordered way, the conceptual mathematical curve of PRED evolution trajectory will keep ascending, and the distinction of PRED of each bay will be revealed.
To increase the quality of life in urban areas, new management systems facilitating the long-run improvement of residential environments are expected. This necessitates a good understanding of the benefits of environmental design and management, as well as the social effects of relevant policies. This paper addressed this issue by studying the incentives of environmental design and management with data of Beijing. Through detailed survey of neighborhoods, the critical factors of environmental design and management were explored, and then the economic effects of these factors on housing prices were investigated. In this way, the incentives of improving the design and management of residential environments were clarified. The results suggested that, planning and design, incompatibility with surrounding neighborhoods, and the property management of neighborhoods, are three critical factors influencing the quality of residential environments, and the environmental design and management of neighborhoods have significant economic values. These results implied that the introduction of environmental design and management system would effectively bring benefits to the neighborhoods. Based on analysis results, the appropriate range of property management fee is also proposed.
This paper presents a modelling framework to model the effect of urbanization on the transmission of infectious disease, which integrates a CA land use development model, population projection matrix model and CA epidemic model by population surface modelling, allowing to analyze its simulation results in a quantitative and spatial way. Its creative feature is combining urbanization, population projection in age-structure with infectious disease transmission in a dynamic, stochastic modelling environment, so it can shed light on providing the relationship between urbanization and infectious disease transmission, which could not be realized by equilibrium or analytical methods. A case study is presented involving modelling influenza transmission in a dynamically evolving city, Southampton, UK. Preliminary results show that the average number of infection cases in years (2001, 2011, 2021 and 2031) has no big difference from each other and suburbanization has very little impact on the infection disease transmission. Moreover, simulation scenario is a useful way to explore the effects of families' movements in part of the city and age-group 20-24 moving out of Southampton on infectious disease transmission here. Its results have the possibility to reflect that both the families' movements in part of the city and age-group 20-24 moving out of Southampton can influence the infectious disease transmission by decreasing the average number of infection cases in the same year.
Being home to one of every five people in the world, China always put the food security issue high on its agenda and has successfully provided adequate food for its people. However, the stagnation of global agricultural production during the 1990s is not a short-term phenomenon caused by policies or market. Therefore, it is significant for food security, agricultural policy making and ecosystem service functions adjustment to recognize the variability of agricultural productivity and its predominant controlling factors at decadal temporal scale. The effect of topography on agricultural productivity variation has been poorly understood due to the lack of spatially explicit agricultural productivity information. In this study, the agricultural productivity variation and its spatial heterogeneity between the 1980s and 1990s are analyzed using a satellite-based production efficiency model (GLO-PEM) driven with NOAA/AVHRR data. It is shown that spatial heterogeneity of agricultural productivity variability was predominantly controlled by the topographic conditions at decadal scale. The proportion of cropland area occurring in agricultural productivity reduction increased with the amplifying relief, and consequently, the probability of cropland in hilly areas suffering from agricultural productivity reduction was 10% -30% higher than cropland in plain areas. Although the total agricultural production had increased in each agricultural region of China during 1981-2000, there were parts of cropland area suffering from reduction of agricultural productivity, accounting for 24% of the total cropland area. In those croplands with decreased agricultural productivity, 71% were located at hilly areas, particularly on the Loess Plateau and Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau areas.
Four TM remote sensing images of Guangzhou in 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005 were taken as data for the present study. The images fully covered the area of Guangzhou. The data sources of land-cover landscape were translated under manual and un-supervised interpretations with GIS software. Two highways were set as the lines of transects by buffer zone techniques. One transect is along north-south direction, and the other is west-east. Meanwhile, the radiative transects were set around the city center, where it was encircled by Huancheng highway. The buffer zone width was five meters. All data sources of land-cover landscapes were cut out by those transects, respectively, and all landscape indices were calculated based on these land-cover landscapes cut out. Based on these data the dynamics of land-cover landscape and their characteristics were analyzed, and results revealed that there were obvious diversifications in transect directions and different radiative transects. The results of quantity structure of land-cover landscape in the study area showed that excessive land-use has been controlled, and urbanization had being experienced development reasoning since 1995. But the diversity of land-cover landscape along the west-east decreases constantly and fragmentation of landscape patches is being expedited. The analyzed results of radiative transects showed that there are many satellite cities around the city center of Guangzhou, and intensity to disturb land-cover landscape is decreasing from the city center to the suburban areas while the diversification in different directions along N-E and S-E is not significant. In southern part, variations of indices of land-cover landscape foretell that sea area is being disturbed by new plan of city development.
The importance associated with employment is especially prominent all over the world especially in China. The population quantity brought huge pressure to the harmonious society of China. This paper records the findings of a survey into the fifth census data of China, and the authors chose 16 indexes in each county, city and urban district based on the GB/T4754-94 industrial classification standards. With the methods of Principal Component Analysis and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis, and visualization technique of ARCGIS, we conclude the employment structure features and spatial distribution of 2343 counties, cities and urban districts in China. The views expressed in this paper are as follows: First, there exist six spatial models in Chinese population employment, i.e., serial-concentric circles, discontinuous-concentric circles, jumpable-concentric circles, mixed-concentric circles, multi-cores concentric circles and belt-concentric circles. Second, we find that the population employment along eastern coastal areas of China and the Yangtse River formed a "T-shaped" pattern, and the spatial distribution of China's employment of an evident urban-rural duality with six clusters. In the Eastern cluster and Northern cluster, the population employment centered upon the secondary industry; in the Beijing-Tianjin cluster, the population employment centered upon the tertiary industry; the Middle Western cluster, the population employment centered upon the first industry; as the Eastern cluster and Northern cluster, the population employment of the Xinjiang cluster centered upon the secondary industry.
Using location specialization index and neg-exponential function, this paper analyzes the labor force spatial distribution characteristics and its change in Shanghai during 1996-2001 based on the work place data of Establishment Census of the People's Republic of China, Shanghai Municipality in 1996 and 2001. From three different dimensions: circles, districts and counties, the paper analyzes the change and characteristics of labor force spatial structure of Shanghai. It is found out that from 1996 to 2001, the labor force density of Shanghai decreases from urban centre with distance, with the highest level in urban core, which fits neg-exponential function curve. The density of inner city shows a downtrend, its edge area uptrend; and the labor force disperses from the urban centre to suburbs, the density difference between centre and suburbs reduces, which shows a homogenizing trend. The labor force spatial distribution trends differ between the secondary industry and tertiary industry. The labor force in the secondary industry disperses from central city to suburbs and exhibits one-way equilibrating change in a larger area. The labor force in the tertiary industry disperses from urban core to its edge area within a distance of 15 km; oppositely it has a centralizing trend to inner city out of a distance of 15 km, especially in exurban area. The function of Shanghai metropolis changes to such a pattern that commerce is becoming a main industry in central districts and manufacture in suburban districts. And spatial model is evolving from monocentric city to polycentric city. Basically the spatial distribution of labor force in Shanghai and its trends accord with the general spatial developing rules of a metropolis, which will benefit Shanghai's sustainable development and spatial reconstruction.
Feminist geography' study is still in a marginal situation in human geography in China, female talents have been ignored in talented personal geography and they haven't also been paid enough attention in feminist geography, all of which indicate that there is a space in the study of female talented personal geography. Based on the statistical data of female talents' quantity, types, active period and birth places, this article discusses their status, structure, geographical distribution and regional differentiation in modern and contemporary China and tries to make an explanation. The research finds out that women in modern and contemporary China have much more chances to participate in social and political affairs than their women forebears so that the quantity and types of female talents both rise in this period. Although female talents have increased much in modern and contemporary China, the number of which is still far less than male talents. Provinces from southern and eastern China such as Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces concentrate a lot of female talents; Hunan Province, which lies in Central China also concentrates a great deal of female talents; few female talents are distributed in northwestern China. Female talents in Hunan and Guangdong provinces are famous for their activities in the political and public field, while talents in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces contribute more to science, education and culture. Female talents' structure and regional differentiation are both influenced by political revolutions and women's liberation movements happened in modern and contemporary China, which diversified in different regions during that period.
