Gentrification is a frontier field of urban residential differentiation, while the rent gap is a core concept to interpret the phenomenon of gentrification. Through reference, analysis and correction to the rent gap model proposed by Smith, this paper puts forward a classical rent gap theory model different from the Western premises of complete marketization and private ownership of land. In China, rent gap consists of two parts, i.e. "actual rent gap" generated by the public ownership of land and the housing depreciation, and "rent jump" generated by the continuous rapid appreciation of real estate. Both are generated under the background of the political and economic system transition, including the decentralization of the central government, the enterprisation of local government, the marketization of land and housing. Based on this, the paper takes the inner city of Nanjing and "Liji Lane Plot", a typical gentrification area, as an example, and makes use of data such as the housing demolition and compensation, changes in the modes of land transfer and land use, housing price change and other data, in order to analyze and validate the gentrification phenomenon of inner city of Nanjing and the driving effects of the rent gap by describing rent gap practices, environmental improvements and gentrification replacement processes in the demolition and reconstruction of urban areas. The empirical study indicates that: (1) driven by the rent gap interest and dominated by the urban growth coalition, over 150 plots in the inner city of Nanjing have realized high-end reconfiguration in terms of built environment and social class structure by "demolishing the old and building the new"; (2) in the principle of the maximum rent gap, some areas have become hot spots of gentrification, including the areas of Confucius Temple in the south of the city, Xiaguan in the north of the city, Xinjiekou in the central city, and areas along main roads and on both sides of the Qinhuai River, due to sufficient profit margin between land redevelopment cost and expected return; (3) in the screening mechanism of the price of reconstructed commodity housing, over 18,700 needy families unable to move back have been passively moved from the inner city to the urban fringe, and the renewed location in the inner city are occupied by the emerging middle class. When we affirm the gentrification as a means of deep urbanization and a strategy for reproduction of space, gentrification should also be criticized for its damage to the traditional culture of the city and multiple deprivation of the original needy residents in the redistribution of rent gap income.
County-level units, which contain both counties and county-level cities, are the key floating population regulating units for China's new urbanization policy. This paper examines the statistical definitions of floating population for the censuses in 1982, 1990, 2000 and 2010. According to the principle of geographic data transformation among different spatial scales, the numbers of both the in-migrants and out-migrants at county level are calculated for each census. And the county-level spatial database of floating population is also built up. Besides, this paper puts forward a modified composite-index method to identify six types of the regional types of floating population, namely, large-scale active net in-migration, small-scale net in-migration, large-scale active net out-migration, large-scale active net out-migration, active balanced migration and inactive migration. Using this method, we analyze the spatial pattern evolution of China's floating population. The main results are listed as follows. (1) The regional types pattern of floating population transferred from inactive domination into active domination and from relative equilibrium into high polarization. Many regions turned into active net out-migration types. Most of the floating population moved into just a few cities which belongs to active net in-migration type. There were only 51 large-scale active net in-migration cities, but they occupied 55.85% of total inter-county in-migrants in China. (2) The spatial pattern of China's floating population regional types also presented a polarized feature. The Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration and Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration in southeast coastal China are the main in-migrant floating population cluster regions, while Beijing, Tianjin and other provincial capitals are also main migration destinations with a monocentric pattern. The active net out-migration regions are mainly located in regions south of the "Qinling Mountains-Huaihe River" Line to the southeast of "Hu Line", which became the largest population losing area in China. (3) Social-economy was the major factor affecting the distribution of floating population regional types. Administration factor also gradually became a leading factor.
The spatial development patterns of administrative villages have attracted attention worldwide. It is a research hot-spot to identify and classify the spatial development patterns precisely in the field of rural geography. In this paper, we introduced the "cell-chain-shape" method, the gravity model, the breaking point model, the factor analysis method and the frequency statistics method, to analyze the spatial development patterns of the 184 administrative villages in Qingpu District of Shanghai Municipality. We identified the spatial development patterns (shapes) - the conductive interfaces of the spatial development patterns of the core administrative villages (chains) - the leading industries of the administrative villages (cells). In order to classify the spatial development patterns of the administrative villages, this paper identified and built them from the perspective of spatial mechanics. The results show that: (1) the evaluation results of competitiveness of spatial development patterns could weigh the comprehensive strength of the regional development patterns, and could also reflect the advantages and disadvantages of each pattern; (2) the "cell-chain-shape" method had strong applicability to identify and classify the spatial development patterns of the administrative villages in the metropolitan suburbs; (3) the spatial development patterns of the administrative villages in Qingpu District could be identified and classified into three categories of patterns (shapes), ten categories of conductive interfaces of the spatial development patterns of the core administrative villages (chains) and 20 categories of the leading industries of administrative villages (cells). The results of this study can provide policy-makers a scientific basis for rural restructuring in the metropolitan suburbs.
Based on the energy supply-delivery, consumption and social development data of 158 countries across the world in 1992, 2000 and 2012, this paper develops an energy security evaluation model from three dimensions (energy supply-delivery security, energy consumption, and social-political-economic environment), with the aid of the integrated application of subjective and objective weight allocation technique. Then we use this model to analyze the spatial-temporal evolution of global energy security pattern and its formation mechanism. The results are shown as follows: (1) since the 1990s, the spatial patterns of global energy security show a deteriorating trend, the sum of countries in 'dangerous' type and 'relatively dangerous' type presents a growth trend. (2) From the point of spatial evolution, the spatial distribution of countries with 'secure' energy system has strong stability, and these countries are concentrated persistently in Western Europe and North America. The spatial evolution of countries with 'relatively secure' energy system also presents a strong stability, which are mainly distributed in the periphery of the 'secure' ones, namely Central and Southern Europe, South America and Eurasia, while countries with 'general' energy system are mainly distributed in Asia, Africa and Southern Europe, and the spatial-temporal evolution of this type is the main cause for the deterioration of world energy security pattern. Countries with 'dangerous' and 'relatively dangerous' energy system are mainly concentrated in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Asia, rendering spatial extension to the east and south. (3) In the past 20 years, the mechanism for world's energy security pattern formation gradually transforms from the 'unitary dimension-dominated' to the 'binary dimension-dominated', and the main factors influencing the global energy security pattern become more diverse. (4) In the pattern of world's energy security, China's performance on energy security has been the world average since the 1990s, and shows a decreasing trend in energy consumption security index. This finding indicates the sustainable environment problem is increasingly prominent in the process of energy consumption.
The process of modern economic growth shows a close relationship between the industrial structure changes and the evolution of economic efficiency, which is specifically reflected in the stages and heterogeneity of regional development. This paper employs the DEA-BCC model and the Malmquist productivity index to analyze the static efficiency and the TFP changes of three industries at sectional and regional levels. Then, based on the DEA-Tobit two-stage analyzing framework, this paper establishes a panel data model to analyze the factors affecting the economic efficiency of three industries. The results show that, three industries are equipped with certain static scale efficiencies, but they still need to be optimized. The TFP of three industries have all improved from 1978 to 2014, but their contributions to the economic growth of three industries show a decreasing sequence, featured by apparent extension. The technical progress has significantly propelled the TFP growth, and the technical efficiency improvements have gradually shifted from pure technical efficiency to scale efficiency. The TFP changes can be divided into four stages. The dividends of institution, structure, factors and policies have all contributed to the TFP growth, while during the industrial structure adjustment stage, the institutional and structural dividends give way to the technical progress. Three industrial TFP changes present obvious regional differences. In general, Eastern China has comparative advantages, while Central China becomes the "concave area", and the TFP changes of the secondary and tertiary industries in Northeast China reflect serious issues of the structural transformation and upgrading. Due to the differences of the internal development laws of different industries, the factors influencing the economic efficiency show the relatively regional consistency and the sectional differences. The primary and tertiary industries changing effect, the non-agricultural level, the opening degree and the human resource endowment have significant positive effects on the economic efficiency of the primary, and the opening degree largely promotes the economic efficiency of the secondary industry, while the opening degree, the human resources endowment have significant negative impacts on the economic efficiency of the tertiary industry. Finally, this paper concludes with suggestions to the future policy-making.
Promoted by the insights and movements of feminism, the geography of body has gradually been established as an important sub-field in human geography since the 1990s, which proposes a new research agenda that is based on the monism of the mind and the body. Expanded upon from the paradigm of post-modernism, it can be seen that the bodily research, which is primarily concerned with how the body is used for experiencing the outside world, producing the knowledge, and occupying the space, plays a critical role in human geography studies, which, to a significant extent, challenges the mainstream culture and makes the marginalized voice heard. Based on the methods of in-depth interviews and participatory observations, this paper tries to explore the ways that scavengers occupy and reconstruct urban space, and therefore to analyze the spatial characteristics and structure of scavengers' enclaves. The findings of this paper include: (1) based on the exploration of scavengers' subtle and fragmented bodily practices and individuals' agency, this paper finds out that this group has successfully achieved the material construction of urban space. Their achievement shows that bodily practices play an important role in occupying the urban space, in particular when this group tries to survive in modern cities. Focusing on this group's bodily practices, this paper provides a new approach to understanding the interests of scavengers and the relations between bodies and places. (2) Framed in the geographical proximity, inter-industrial relations and the patronage relations, this paper finds out that scavengers from the same province has built a special type of enclave that is hidden behind the urban space. This group of people has also contributed to the formation of working territory with vague boundaries but definite power of acquisition. This process has transferred the urban space that is defined by institutions of urban planning into the mixed space which is endowed with both the urban and the rural characteristics. The building of scavengers' enclave explains how bodies of the marginalized group reshape and reconstruct places, which, to a notable extent, promotes the development of empirics of the geography of body within China.
During the social and economic transition process, the urban structure of China's cities has changed dramatically and residents' behavior has become more complicated. Against this background, the space-time behavior approach has become an important perspective through which to understand urban space in China. Space-time fixity and flexibility have been recognized as important concepts in transportation, human geography and feminist geography, as they reflect the space-time constraints and opportunities of people and influence their access and mobility in important ways, but the direct empirical studies to date are far from sufficient. Gender differentiation is a key issue and an important perspective in urban studies. Many studies of Western countries have found that women experience more fixity constraints than men, which leads to lower accessibility to job opportunities. However, gender differences of space-time fixity and flexibility in China, where the different institutional, social, economic and cultural background might lead to different results, are still not clear.
This paper takes temporal and spatial flexibilities as the objects of research, and examines how individual, household and activity attributes impact them from a gender differentiation perspective. Activity-travel diaries and 7-day GPS tracking data of 709 respondents in the Shangdi-Qinghe area of Beijing from a 2012 activity-travel survey are used, and temporal and spatial flexibilities are measured with the respondents' self-reported information. Firstly, we analyze the flexibility levels of individuals' activities by activity type and gender using descriptive statistics. Then, ordered logit models are used to investigate the relationships between space-time flexibility and attributes of individual, household and activity, and how these relationships vary between males and females.
The results show that temporal and spatial flexibility levels vary significantly among different activities, individuals and households, with activity type being a key factor. Chinese females do not perceive significantly stronger fixity constraints than males, as existing empirical studies of Western countries found. In fact, the activities of females are more flexible in China, which reflects different divisions of responsibilities and conceptions of intergenerational assistance in Chinese households. The relationship between temporal flexibility and spatial flexibility is quite complex, and the interaction of the two dimensions of flexibility and its impacts on space-time accessibility needs more attention. This study of space-time flexibility reflects the complexity and potential characteristics of residents' behavior, and helps us get a better understanding of the mechanism of people's decision-making and cities’ operation. It also provides empirical evidence for relevant planning and policy making.
Based on the theory of industry evolution and scale coupling, this article constructs a multi-scale unified theoretic analysis framework of spatial organizational mechanism of port & shipping service industry. On the global scale, an induction and deduction analysis has shown that under the influence of economic globalization, technological reform, industrial organization reform, regional strategic responses, and other multi-level factors and mechanisms, a hierarchical assignment structure has been formed in port & shipping service industry, with a minority of hub port cities becoming pivotal nodes of port & shipping service agglomeration and development, of which the structural gravity has been shifted from transportation & warehousing to agent & technical services, and subsequently to advanced port & shipping service enterprises. On the urban scale, owing to the differences of the intrinsic attributes of port & shipping service industry and the location endowment, the spatial layout of port and shipping service enterprises has displayed a distribution pattern, which automatically assigns advanced class, agent & technical class and transportation & warehousing class respectively from the center to the periphery of a city. The framework analyzed above has been used in addition with the positional data of port and shipping service enterprises in the city of Shanghai from 1996 to 2014 to corroborate an empirical study on the processes, structures, and patterns of the city's spatial organization of port and shipping service industry. The statistical analysis suggests that the proportions of transportation & warehousing class, agent & technical class, and advanced class of port & shipping service enterprises have been converted from 77.81%, 20.15%, and 2.04% to 47.78%, 46.20%, and 6.03%, respectively, from 1996 to 2014, with a manifest trend of industrial upgrading to the higher end of the value chain. The methodological approach of this article includes a circle distance analysis, a hotspot analysis and a kernel density estimation, which collectively evince that: (1) the tendency of suburbanization of transportation & warehousing enterprises has been strengthened; (2) the agglomeration trend of the agent & technical enterprises remains strong, along with a noticeable diffusion pattern with intermittent character; (3) the advanced enterprises are highly polarized to the center, with warm spots developing steadily in the peripheral areas. As the final stage of the analysis, this article enunciated the macro and micro mechanisms that have affected the structural and distributional patterns indicated above.
The structural robustness of maritime transportation network describes the anti-jamming ability of maritime transportation system, which is closely related to the transportation efficiency. Current researches on the robustness of maritime transportation networks mainly focus on the container transportation network, but ignore the type difference of cargo ships or even ports. This paper builds a more complete global maritime transportation network with the AIS data of the global cargo ships in 2015. Then, for the three transportation modes, namely oil tanker, container and bulk carrier, it proves that the three networks are complex networks with topological structures following the power law distribution, and three attack strategies including a random attack and two intentional attacks are conducted to evaluate the survivability of the corresponding transportation networks in different situations. The results show that: (1) in sharp comparison to the transportation network based on OD information of container liners, the networks constructed with the AIS data of the cargo ships fully reflect the global cargo transportation pattern and process; (2) The robustness of different maritime transportation networks differs greatly, with the container transportation network being the weakest and the bulk carrier transportation network the strongest. (3) Small intentional attacks may exert greater impact on the integrity of the container transportation network, but have less impact on bulk carrier transportation network and oil tanker transportation network. It is argued that these conclusions can help to improve decision support capabilities on maritime transportation planning and emergency response, which facilitates the establishment of a more reliable maritime transportation system.
The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region has been playing a national leading role in land transportation development since the establishment of modern transportation system till the coming era of high-speed transportation network. Aiming at exploring the long-term evolutionary characteristics of land transportation in the BTH region, this paper firstly sorts out its development history from a temporal scale of one century. Taking the 13 prefecture-level cities within the BTH region as research anchor cities, this paper then probes into its accessibility evolution through building a time-distance model, which takes a leaping mode of transportation into account. The results are obtained as follows. (1) The century-long history of land transportation in the BTH region could be divided into five consecutive stages, namely, starting stage of modern transportation (1881-1937), stagnancy stage of transportation development (1937-1949), expansion stage of road network (1949-1980), construction stage of trunk roads (1980-1995), and growth stage of high-speed transportation network (1995 till now). The Beijing-centered structure has been formed since the very beginning. (2) The accessibility spatial pattern of land transportation in the BTH region has evolved from expansion along traffic corridors to formation of concentric circles. The circle structure of 13 anchor cities has gradually developed into a continuous joint space. (3) There are distinct hierarchical differences in transportation circle structure among 13 anchor cities. Beijing has always been at the top of hierarchy while the status of Zhangjiakou has declined sharply since the founding of the People's Republic of China. The Beijing-Tianjin region was firstly formed as a short-time commuting traffic circle. However, the transportation advantage of the central part of Hebei province, which lies at the center of the BTH region, has not been fully realized.
The fundamental goals of building the "21st Century Maritime Silk Road" are to construct a maritime transport channel and international maritime network and to enhance international relations and the interconnectedness of infrastructure. Using international shipping data from China's container ports for 1995, 2005 and 2015, this paper applies methodologies such as the graph theory model, the complex network method, and the Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index. First, this paper analyses the spatial pattern of the international maritime network between China and other countries located along the "21st Century Maritime Silk Road". Second, this paper identifies international maritime hub ports and discusses the status of domestic ports. The main conclusions are as follows. (1) The range of the maritime network between China and other countries on the "21st Century Maritime Silk Road" expanded between 1995 and 2015. However, some ports, such as Singapore, Klang, Colombo, and Suez, built closer relations with Chinese ports, and ports in East Africa established few shipping routes connected to Chinese ports. These developments were affected by the condition of the ports' locations and by international trade. (2) It is clear that the hierarchy of China's ports proceeds from two hubs (Hong Kong and Shanghai) to four hubs (Shanghai, Ningbo, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong). Ningbo port developed very quickly, while the status of Hong Kong port underwent a relative decline. The four hubs can be divided into two models of adjacent ports. The high degree of overlap of shipping routes resulted in fierce competition between the ports of Ningbo and Shanghai. The ports of Shenzhen and Hong Kong have different radiation scopes, and consequently, their development has been dislocated. (3) There are four port clusters in China connecting to ports on the "21st Century Maritime Silk Road". The ports in the southwest port cluster disappeared in the later period of this study, and the status of the Pearl River Delta port cluster underwent a relative decline, while the status of the port cluster in the Yangtze River Delta improved. The Bohai port cluster gradually established direct connections with the countries on the "21st Century Maritime Silk Road". (4) Overall, the maritime network has experienced three stages of growth: the development stage, the hierarchical stage and the networking stage. Globalization, changes in transportation technology, and the evolution of geopolitics and the economy are the most important mechanisms driving the maritime network.
The "Geng Lu Bu" of South China Sea is a national non-material cultural heritage, which carries Hainan fishermen's deep "Family-country" feelings and collective memory about the activities of “Cultivating the Sea” for thousands of years. With the rapid development of navigation technologies and positioning systems in a modern society, "Geng Lu Bu" is gradually fading out of the stage of history. Hainan fishermen’s collective memory of "Geng Lu Bu" has been suffering from amnesia, so it is of great significance to discuss how to activate "Geng Lu Bu" as a cultural heritage, and is of great urgency to explore how to not only protect but also inherit the collective memory effectively. Data and information are obtained from field surveys in Wenchang and Qionghai of Hainan and interviews from 20 local old fishermen. By adopting software NVivo8 to analyze the interview data and some relevant literatures, this paper discussed the dynamic change and reconstruction mechanism of collective memory. Results show that: (1) The intergenerational change of memory subject and the functional evolution of memory objective information has weakened the survival environment of "Geng Lu Bu". The fishermen's vague perception of fishing time and season obstructs the intergenerational inheritance of the memory about "Geng Lu Bu". (2) Multiple memory subjects' persue attaches new value and meaning to "Geng Lu Bu", and this, from another perspective, can reflect the reconstruction of collective memory of "Geng Lu Bu". Besides, the tradition of family inheritance and the systematization of scared space have activated the vital force of this memory. Conducted by the media, information's reorganization and identity assimilation has become an important way to reconstruct the memory. (3) Fishermen's local identity and emotional connection to the South China Sea, is the core of the memory's reconstruction. The localization of geographical space has formed a mutual communication between collective memory and individual memory. The exogenous character of collective memory has been sublimated into the "family-country isomorphism". (4) As the birthplace of "Cultivating the Sea" culture, the South China Sea's spatial pattern change has depended on the memory about "Geng Lu Bu" and interacted with each other. In the future, the linkage of the memory about "Geng Lu Bu" and the memory subject would be significantly affected by the fishermen's spatial practice and identity. The paper finally puts forward some suggestions on the protection and activation of cultural heritage.
The core content of ancient Chinese cartography is "the six principles of cartography" pioneered by Pei Xiu (Hawn) in the 3rd century, which was subsequently developed by several generations of renowned cartographic experts in China. A large number of highly valuable ancient and modern maps had been completed by the end of the 19th century. Eleven Chinese world-renowned maps were selected based on the author’s personal participation in the Basic Science & Technological Special Program National Project, which also referred to three ancient Chinese atlases (published in AD 1990-1997). The eleven maps include the following: Dixing Fangzang Tu (a general map), the first scientific map produced in the 3rd century; Hainei Huayi Tu (a general map covering Asia), made in the 8th century; Astronomical figure, a first scientific star figure depicted 1440 constellations made in 1190, which was the original drawing of Suzhou stone carving astronomical figure; Yu Ditu (a general map), made in 1315, which marked the perfection of ancient Chinese cartography; Daming Hunyi Tu (a general map), made in 1389; Genglu Bo (a South China Sea chart used by fishermen), and Zheng He's Nautical Chart, made in the 15th century; Guangyu Tu (a comprehensive atlas) made in 1541; Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (a large Chinese world map in color), made in 1602; Kangxi Quanlan Tu (a general map), which was the first large map including measurements of latitude and longitude made in 1718; Haiguo Tuzhi (a world atlas and annals), which is the predecessor of the contemporary and modern Chinese world atlases made in 1842-1852. The discussion of these ancient maps focused on their scientific, historical, foreign, sailing, territorial, military, and cultural values. Simultaneously, we evaluated their innovations and evolution of map-positioning technology between Chinese and Western cartography. Finally, we hope that the National Bureau of Surveying and Mapping of China provide more support and promote the construction of an ancient Chinese map ecosystem to accelerate the use, evaluation, and mining of the heritage of ancient Chinese maps.
Grid cell is the basic unit to express population distribution based on gridded population data. The choice of suitable grid size is very important, as the resolution must be fine enough to capture the desired spatial variation of population within the area of interest. The research on grid size suitability refers to determinate an appropriate grid size for revealing the population distribution difference and the distribution position for human beings in geographical space. It is important to provide improvement in accuracies of gridded population distribution. However, currently little research has been done in this area. Many well-modeled gridded population dataset are basically built at a single grid scale. If the grid cell size is not appropriate, it will result in spatial information loss or data redundancy. Besides, there is scale dependency in the spatial distribution of population. And the characteristics of population distribution patterns are different at varied grid scales. This study designed a scheme on grid size suitability evaluation method. The rural area of Xuanzhou District in Anhui Province was selected as the study area. The research on grid size suitability was carried out by constructing three kinds of expressed levels, which included location expressed level, numeric information expressed level and spatial relationship expressed level. The scheme on choosing suitable grid size was determined in combination of grid size-indicator value curves. Then the suitable grid size was selected and its rationality was evaluated. Results reveal that comsidering three expressions of location, numeric information and spatial relationship, 40 m and 50 m grids are relatively suitable grid size, which can be recommended as the appropriate scale for generating a high-quality gridded population distribution in the study area. Based on the preliminary study, result also indicates that it is reasonable and effective to assess grid size suitability by the evaluation method in three perspectives of expressed level. It is expected that the method on grid size suitability can make contributions to the advancement of accurate gridded population mapping.
