Analyzing the characteristics and formation mechanism of the spatial correlation network for urban water utilization efficiency has important policy implications for improving coordination and efficiency of regional urban water utilization. In this paper, we take 107 cities at prefecture level and above located in the Yangtze River Economic Belt as the research area. We calculate the water utilization efficiency from 2009 to 2018 by using the stochastic frontier analysis and construct the spatial correlation matrix. We also investigate the overall structure, individual structure, and spatial clustering mode of the spatial correlation network of urban water utilization efficiency based on the social network analysis, and explore the network formation mechanism based on the quadratic assignment procedure. The empirical results indicate that: First, the overall utilization efficiency of urban water is still at a low level, but has improved significantly with the appearance of the spatial correlation network pattern. The overall network has good accessibility and little asymmetry exists between connection pairs. However, there are still some problems such as loose correlation and poor stability of network structure. Second, the central cities in the upper, middle and lower reaches act as the main undertakers and intermediary communicators, showing the spatial distribution characteristics of "core-periphery" among the central and marginal cities. Third, the spatial correlation plates of urban water utilization efficiency can be divided into the net spillover, main benefit and two-way spillover plates, following the distribution characteristics of the urban agglomerations in the Yangtze River Delta, the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, and the Chengdu-Chongqing region. Last, geographical proximity, economic development, openness, and other natural geographical conditions and socio-economic factors have significant impacts on the formation of the urban water utilization network.

For a long time, the ocean has been located at the edge of the society, and the ocean governance inevitably falls into the terrain-centrism. This paper criticized the marine territorial governance of terrestrial ontology and its territorial logic, and constructed the ocean as a four-dimensional space-time where volume space meets dynamic time. It pointed out that the ocean was multi-dimensional, fluid, nonlinear and non-objective, and constructs a framework for analyzing the ocean territory, which is characterized by volume territory, mobile territory and dynamic territory. Furthermore, it is applied to the theory and policy cognition of maritime territorial governance in the South China Sea (SCS), reconstructing the concept of "time, space and movement" that has long been shackled on the land norms, and responding to the new materialist orientation of cultural and political geography. The results show that: (1) In terms of volume control in the SCS, island expansion is an effective strategy. The expansion of islands and reefs has folded the volume of the sea into a two-dimensional territory, controlling the three-dimensional space by flattening it, and changing the geographical and spatial nature of the SCS. (2) In terms of liquidity control in the SCS, due to the fluid, scale and depth characteristics of the sea, as well as the ambiguity of the legal boundary, it is more complicated to maintain maritime security in the SCS. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the corresponding regulatory strategy to control illegal liquidity. (3) In terms of the dynamic management and control in the SCS, attention should be paid to fishermen's unique ecological ethics, and the dialogue between different ontologies and information translation should be considered for marine protection, so that the protection behavior can be more closely integrated into the local social and cultural contexts. This study provides a critical perspective for marine territorial governance from political geography and promotes the study of the relationship between human beings in human geography.

To achieve regional sustainable development and high-quality development, regular monitoring and scientific assessment are needed. The most widespread and informative method for such an assessment is to employ a composite index. To generate a composite index, various indicators that reflect regional development quality in different aspects are weighted and then aggregated to an index. The core idea of the composite index is weighting, which can be achieved objectively or subjectively. Objective weighting is usually conducted using statistical characteristics of indicator values; thus, the resultant weights change with the values of indicators. This change questions the objectivity of the weighting. In contrast, subjective weighting well reflects the willingness of decision-makers, who feel it is difficult to determine the weights of each indicator if there are too many. Fortunately, a recently developed method eliminated this difficulty. It requires only the rank (also ranked weights) instead of the accurate weights of different indicators, but the number of indicators is restricted to only three. In this study, we improved this method by relaxing such a restriction. We employed the duality of linear programming to generalize the method for calculating a composite index based on any number of indicators. The aggregation is adjusted to expand the scope of the application, and the use of entropy weights is adjusted to improve the interpretability of results. Furthermore, we developed three different calculation modes: single, multiple, and full ranks, corresponding to three conditions of decision-makers' subjectivity: strong, weak, and non-subjective, respectively. Finally, we employed this method to examine global sustainable development patterns temporally and spatially. Since this method is suitable for high- and low-dimensional cases and can consider decision-makers' subjectivity, it has strong universality.