Man-land relationship research, as the core of geographical research, runs through each development stage of Geography. Based on extensive literature review, this paper systematically generalizes the connotations, research development and contents of man-land relationship in China. (1) It explores the connotations and evolvement rules of man-land relationship in different social development stages in China, and finds that the core role of man-land relationship in geographical research has been strengthened continuously. Changing with times, its connotations have been considerably enriched by sustainable development and other notions, and so does its theoretical system. (2) It applies the bibliometric method to sketch out the basic research status of man-land relationship in China. Specifically, it quantitatively identifies the funding sources, major research teams and journals for publication. It finds that the funding sources show a diversification trend with national funding being the primary source of research grants. The most competitive research teams are mainly concentrated in the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and normal universities. Journals sponsored by the Geographical Society of China are most influential in publishing man-land relationship research. (3) As resources and environment are the fundamental carriers of man-land relationship, this study focuses further on the research on resource-environmental base of man-land relationship, and finds that the resource-environmental base research in China has gone through an evolution process from single factor perspective research to comprehensive multiple perspective research gradually. Research themes have also experienced similar changes from land, water, energy minerals or other single factor research to comprehensive factor research of resources and environment. Empirical studies on national and regional development strategies are the feature of man-land relationship in China. More emphasis should be put on considering and following the changes in features of "man" and "land" and research on the impacts of new factors on man-land relationship in a developing and dynamic manner in the future. Particularly, we should pay more attention to research on the impacts of spatio-temporal changes in resource-environment absolute location on modes of man-land interaction, and to strengthening interdisciplinary research and systematic research on comprehensive integrated techniques so as to advance the development of application of man-land relationship theories and practices.
As a result of socio-economic development, the middle class in China has grown considerably and has gradually become an important social group, and its expanding housing demand has exerted a profound effect on the socio-spatial structure of cities. This paper analyzes the spatial differentiation and formation mechanism of the middle class social area in Guangzhou to provide a reference for the policy implications of social development planning and urban planning and redevelopment. Based on the fifth and sixth censuses, 148 sub-districts from 10 districts of Guangzhou in 2010 are divided into five social areas—mixed class, middle class, salaried workers, peasant class, and working class—by principal components analysis hierarchical cluster methods, and the spatial distribution and characteristics of the middle class social area are analyzed. Next, using a concentration index, the middle class community is divided into four sub-areas: the educational middle class, the professional middle class, the income middle class, and the mixed middle class. The same approach is then used to examine the spatial distribution and characteristics of the middle class social area in 2000. In comparison of the results from 2000 and 2010, it can be seen that the middle class social area in Guangzhou has experienced the following changes: (1) The middle class social area is expanding, with evident suburbanization and centralization. (2) The suburban area, the banks of the Pearl River, and the economic development zone are the main areas where the middle class is concentrated. (3) The agglomeration of a floating population in the urban villages is leading to the disappearance of the middle class social area. (4) In each sub-social area of middle class, the number and the sub-social area they belonged to have been changing from 2000 to 2010. (5) The middle class social area can be divided into four subtypes according to their changing condition: a stable type, an unstable type, a decaying type, and a growing type. Finally, this paper analyzes the mechanism of the change in the middle class social area from the perspectives of social strata polarization, real estate, globalization, the historical continuity of traditional social space, individual behavior, and urban construction.
Pilot reforms gradually implemented through key nodes have become an important pattern of regional development in China since the introduction of its reform and opening up policy in 1978. On the basis of an analysis of the evolution processes and characteristics of regional development policies in China since the launch of the reform and opening up policy, this paper develops the concept and analytical framework of national node strategies (NNS), defined as regional development strategies centered on important nodes, by addressing their theoretical basis and research scope, before exploring quantitatively their regional economic impacts through the examples of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, Pudong New Area, and Binhai New Area from different stages of the reform and opening up drive. The results indicate that the evolution of China's regional development policies can be divided into three stages, namely the exploration stage led by Special Economic Zones, the expansion stage dominated by Economic Development Zones, and the optimization stage featuring New State-level New Areas and National Comprehensive Reform Pilot Areas. During all the three stages, NNS have played an important demonstrative and leading role and promoted the rapid evolution of China's regional development policies from localized trails to widespread implementation, and the role of the government has also changed accordingly. As an innovative application and development of growth pole theory for a transitional period in China, NNS have become "engines" of regional development as well as important conduits of institutional innovations. NNS and regional development have achieved a benign coupling and formed a gradated regional development model. Empirical research indicates that NNS are an important method of the government for guiding and regulating regional economic development, with complex and diverse economic effects that differ depending on their stage and scale.
The structural reform of the supply side is a crucial top-level design for promoting sustainable economic growth in China right now. Its implementation will do a great deal to help the rural transformation process. With the goal of optimizing rural spatial structures and promoting the flow of resources and information between urban and rural communities, the reconstruction of hollow villages can revitalize idle land and maximize resources. This research investigated how the structural reform of the supply side might influence the reconstruction of hollow villages. The results indicated that the traditional economic growth mode which simply relied on the demand side led to the emergence and aggravation of the hollow village problem. In contrast, the structural reform of the supply side would promote the reconstruction of hollow villages in three ways: accelerating development in rural areas, reducing existing inventories in real estate, and increasing the supplies of institutions. In order to ensure that key technologies would be successfully applied in the process of hollow village reconstruction, in our study we built an institutional security system, which included a settlement institution for rural immigrants, a management institution for rural homesteading, a fiscal and taxation institution for hollow village consolidation, and a social welfare and employment institution. Based on the research of evolution history for "human-land-house" relationship, the article discussed the significance that the structural reform of the supply side would have on new "human-land-house" relationship establishment.
Regional development researches at home and abroad have the trend of single factor and index towards multi-factor and multi-index comprehensive measure. Using the academic thought for reference, this paper selected 12 indices from 6 dimensions, including income, consumption, education, urbanization of population, traffic and living facilities. Polyhedron method was put forward to comprehensively measure regional multi-dimensional development level. Polygon method and vector sum method were improved for being more suitable for studying regional multi-dimensional development status. Regional multi-dimensional development level by county, city and province in China was measured comprehensively and its spatial difference was analyzed by using the above three methods as well as the weighted sum method applied widely. The study found that at the county level there was remarkable regional difference in the single-index values of different dimensions and regional multi-dimensional development index. Regional multi-dimensional development index was high in the eastern coastal areas, medium in the central region as well as the northern border regions and low in the southwest as well as the western border regions. Districts characterized by the levels of high and very high were distributed in the eastern coastal areas, cities of the central and western regions as well as the areas of energy and mineral resource development. Distribution tendency of the districts featured by the levels of low and very low was in accordance with that of the poverty-stricken areas. Correlation analyses of four methods’ results were conducted by SPSS and Excel at the province, city and county level respectively. The results showed that the four methods were equivalent in the practical application. They all could be used for regional multi-dimensional development measure. Correlation analysis between multi-dimensional development index calculated by the polyhedron method and GDP per capita indicated that the latter could not represent the level of regional multi-dimensional development.
Human settlements quality is of great significance for regional development. Combining natural elements (relief amplitude, climate index, hydrology index and vegetation index) and human elements (night light index, air quality index and traffic access index), this paper constructed Human Settlements Quality Composite Index (HSCI) at regional scale based on raster data to examine spatial variation law of human settlements quality in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in 2010. Also, based on the above, correlation between human settlements quality and population distribution was explored. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Affected by distances from the Bohai Sea and the Taihang Mountains, natural environment in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region became gradually poor from the southeast to the northwest. Specifically, Tianjin and Cangzhou which were close to the Bohai Sea were the best, while Zhangjiakou and Chengde which were located in the west of Taihang Mountain were the worst. (2) Human environment in urban areas was superior to that in nonurban areas. And it was also consistent with administrative levels, that was prefecture-level cities were better than county-level cities. Meanwhile, because of poor air quality, human environment in southern areas was worse than that in northern ones overall. Specifically, Beijing had the best human environment, while Hengshui held the worst one. (3) HSCI presented a descending series from southeast to northwest of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, and the east side of the Taihang Mountains was more human-friendly than the west side. Besides, urban areas were more preferable than nonurban areas; still, higher level administrative regions were better than the lower ones. Consequently, Tianjin and Tangshan became the best, while Zhangjiakou and Chengde were the worst. (4) The population of the study region was mostly distributed in areas with medium human settlements quality instead of the best ones, and the correlation between population and HSCI presented a normal distribution pattern. On the whole, land with HSCI greater than 0.6 took up about 35% of the total, but it gathered about 40% of the population, which demonstrated that land with high quality human settlements had been fully used and there performed a coordination relationship between population distribution and human settlements quality distribution.
Urban spatial expansion has been research hotspot of urban geography for a long time. However, urban spatial progress and its driving forces showed diversified state under the context of different political systems and different development phases in the world. For example, there are debates on metropolitan expansion path between Western countries and China. One view advocated that metropolitan spatial expansion showed a trend from clustered to dispersed under the role of scale-economy. Another view found that above theory could not explain metropolitan spatial expansion progress in developing countries, such as China and India. In these metropolitan regions, rapid urban spatial expansion existed in "urban-rural integration" areas, not central big cities of metropolitan regions. Thus, it was different from Western developed countries due to particular political and economic factors in developing countries. In order to clarify metropolitan spatial pattern in a transitional period from planned economy to market economy, we utilized nighttime light data to analyze Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei metropolitan area from 1992 to 2012 as a case. A series of measurement methods has been used in the study, such as expansion intensity index, spatial correlation model and multi-dimensional model. The results are as follows: (1) Beijing, Tianjin, Tangshan were hotspot regions of metropolitan expansion during the whole research period. "Triangle region" among Baoding-Tianjin-Hebei were coldspot regions of metropolitan expansion. (2) Although metropolitan expansion has showed a dispersed trend, centralized powers are still strong in the progress of metropolitan development. (3) Metropolitan driving forces showed a diversified state. Market power was the main driving forces, followed by administration power, exogenous power and endogenous power. Market power, administration power and exogenous power has showed an upward trend. However, endogenous power has showed a downward trend. (4) We put forward some policy suggestions to optimize metropolitan spatial structure, such as reducing administrative intervention, building market-driven mechanism, strengthening internal and external two-way reform and promoting industrial upgrade.
The expanding impervious surface along with the process of urbanization has produced great impact on ecological land in most of megalopolises all over the world. A typical urban expansion process usually shows a phase character, and the rapid increase of urban area has a non-linear correlation with vegetation degradation. Therefore, it is essential to recognize the important turning points in the curve of urban growth and the expansion pattern, which would also make a clear understanding of ecosystems' responses to urbanization. Landsat TM/ETM+ dataset was widely used in the detection of landscape change, however, most of the studies used the visual interpreted data per 5 years or above to characterize a long-term variation, and less attention was paid to the identifications of urban sprawl stages. In this study, with western Shenzhen City as a case study area, two new indexes of MNDBI* and NDVI* were built based on long-term Landsat dataset during 1987-2015, in order to identify the turning points of urban sprawl in temporal dimension and analyze the landscape evolution characteristics at different expansion axes. The results showed that western Shenzhen had experienced a rapid urbanization and the water area as well as vegetation coverage decreased dramatically. Specifically, the urban growth could be divided into two phases, i.e. rapadly growing period and stable period by the year 2003, and the vegetation degradation changed in 1999. The similar turning points confirmed the consistent spatiotemporal correlation between urbanization and the ecosystem responses. Furthermore, from the perspective of spatial differentiation, urban sprawl consistently occurred in the northern districts and coastland with sea reclamation until 2003-2006. The southern districts in western Shenzhen experienced the stable urbanization period much earlier than the other ones, with the turning points were identified during 1995-1998. Urban landscape evolution showed various characteristics in different profiles, a large number of sample points were selected through the west, north, east, northwest, northeast directions per 120 m, and the two indexes were calculated in 1987 and 2015 in four directions from central Shenzhen. Obvious urbanization as well as vegetation degradation could be found in a further expansion radius. Also, it is indicated that the north and west profiles should be the major urban expansion axes. In a word, Shenzhen's urbanization has exerted a complex effect on the eco-environment, and in order to realize vegetation restoration, a series of environmental protection policies were promulgated and implemented in recent 10 years. However, this could only postpone the process of habitat degradation rather than ecological restoration. Therefore, more powerful policies are required in the future development of Shenzhen City, and more attention should be focused on the response of ecosystems to the urbanization process.
As the subnet is derived from and supplied by urban road network, public transport network (PTN) owes its maximum development to the development level of urban road network. The structural defects of PTN often make itself the culprit of urban traffic congestion. Traditional research on spatial distribution of PTN tends to regard PTN as an independent mode of transportation, but overlooks the endogenous effect of urban road network’s morphology and structure. Based on the idea of binary network, this paper discusses the local and global spatial dependency of Beijing bus-line distribution by constructing the space correlation matrix between bus-line and city road and introducing dependency measures from 1-mode network. This endeavor also divides the dependence space of Beijing bus-line by community detection with the help of the software named Ucinet 6. We find out that in terms of local dependence, the layout of bus-line is highly dependent on a few city trunk roads and expressway connecting downtown and suburb, so its spatial dependence pattern becomes a corridor diffusion pattern of core-periphery, which takes the downtown as the core and the rapid suburban corridors as the channel. In terms of global dependence, the unbalanced distribution structure of bus-line seems more fragile and is greatly influenced by the city road traffic conditions. Meanwhile, the downtown area bounded by the Forth Ring becomes the core space of bus-line dependence. In terms of space division, the layout of Beijing bus-line presents good correspondence to the city districts. To exemplify this, Chaoyang District, Haidian District and the area within the Third Ring Road have the densest bus-line distributions.
Yangshuo is one of the counties in China that were opened to tourists in the early period; its evolutionary process can be seen as unique and typical. In the primary period, there was a "West Street Phenomenon" with harmonious host-guest relationships, good commercial order and leisure atmosphere, which had drawn wide attention from media and industry, which was yet given little interpretation by the academia. This paper draws on theories of tourism governance and destination development, by conducting empirical induction and case study, aiming to explore why the "West Street Phenomenon" formed and existed. Main research results and implications are as follows: In the initial stage of tourism development, the rational tourists with complete information helped to regulate Yangshuo's business situation. A bottom-top mutual negotiation between the market and the community existed and helped to maintain a consensus order, resulting in an informal "institution" with honest business atmosphere that was embedded into the local field of social network and tourism trade. The local government could then follow the market rules and realize effective governance without interference. In conclusion, this thesis has investigated the issue of tourism governance within the context of destination evolution, which mainly focuses on the initial stage of destination development. By summarizing the development characteristics of the destination that was triggered by tourists who consume rationally and are constrained by a budget, the research partly indicates the possible impact of the rational return of tourism market in the context of consumption transition. The inspiration for practice is obvious. In order to achieve a sustainable development of the destination, an appropriate control over the speed and the scale of tourism development is beneficial. In doing so, this can leave time and space for local people and even the government to cultivate abilities and power to deal with the complexity of tourism governance. Futhermore, educating tourists and promoting government's supervision to establish rules first can contribute to the sustainable development of tourism destination.
Tourism-oriented commercialization, a widely adopted approach to rejuvenating historic districts in China, generates positive effects as well as produces negative impacts. Social space theory suggests that the typical evolution of the commercialization of tourist historic districts (THDs) results from the collaboration of entrepreneurs, residents, tourists, and other community patrons. Entrepreneurs act as a networking hub within the community and are the orchestrators of business practices. These practices include how spaces are developed, animated, and experienced, and which are initially guided by practitioner considerations and values. Eventually, the involvement of different practitioners makes THDs shared and flexible spaces where individualized business practices lead to particular benefits for collaborators and patrons. Therefore, the development and evolution of commercial THD spaces is a melting pot of inputs and actions by diverse stakeholders and partners. To clarify and further the knowledge on the development of social spaces in THDs, this research focused on a classic THD in Shuangdong, Yangzhou, a well-known historical city in Jiangsu Province. In addition to the fieldwork, the statistical methods applied included chi-square tests, correspondence analysis, fuzzy mathematics, and logistic regression. The results for Shuangdong THD (SDTHD) showed that business practices are varied and competitive, and generate positive and negative effects. Tourism-oriented commercialization creates employment and self-employment opportunities mainly for the middle-low classes of residents inside and outside SDTHD, making them an important core for THD entrepreneurship. THD entrepreneurs were classified into three groups: (1) highly-motivated, emphasizing environmentally-friendly and business expansion practices; (2), moderately-motivated with more limited vision and a focus on business maintenance; and (3) lowly-motivated who are dissatisfied and withdraw. The distinguishable attributes and effects of the practices of these three groups were identified. Specific business tactics result from the entrepreneurs acting individually as well as collectively. Additionally, patrons and residents seek out and derive differing benefits from the THD, resulting in a complex mixture of business practices and customer and resident rewards. This research concludes that tourism-oriented commercialization produces interweaving positive and negative impacts on communities; neither of which can be completely controlled due to the complex interaction of all the players in THDs.
The rise and behavior change of rural residents' tourism consumption are components of the rural transformation, and also the important support of the transformation and upgrading of rural residents' consumption and tourism industry under the new normal. The study of tourist behavior has always been a hot area at home and abroad, in which the urban residents are mainly focused, while the rural residents are less discussed. The paper, in the case of rural areas of southern Jiangsu Province, builds the mechanism analysis framework of tourist behavior embedded in rural households, using the multinomial Logit model to discuss the characteristics and mechanism of rural households' tourism destination choice behavior in developed regions.
