The trend of cultural turn in western academia galvanized a transformation in European and American human geography, especially cultural geography, from a macroscopic view of space to a more microscopic one. According to the viewpoints in “new cultural geography”, space should be textualized and thus made accessible for interpretation. Space is no longer defined merely as a material entity where social, cultural and political phenomena are located and distributed, but media through which social processes take place and exert influences. Since social processes and power relationships constantly reshape the meanings and define the constructions of spaces, the interpretations of spaces can therefore reveal those processes and transformation embedded in the meanings conveyed by particular spaces. To understand spatial symbolism requires at first the clarification of the conceptions of symbolism and its application in human geography. With elaborations by Aase, Peirce etc., we get a basic understanding of symbolism in geography, which mainly focuses on the meanings engendered from the interactions between human behaviors and the environmental milieu. In the mean time, geographers should then focus their attention on intense social transformation and power relations, in order to reveal both cultural and spatial impacts of the above processes in society. Research cases in the western academia can be roughly divided into two main themes: (1) social transformation; (2) political and power relations between or among different social groups. In this paper, cases drawn from western literature are briefly introduced to present a collective view of mainstream research interest concerning the meanings and symbolism of space. The authors then propose that in order to keep up with the international academic trends, the topic of space symbolism is worth attention for the Chinese geography researchers. In light of the rapid social and economic social transformation in contemporary China, it is reasonable to assume that processes in Chinese society will then produce profound influences on spatiality, thus inserting meanings into spaces.
How to protect and develop local traditional culture is an essential problem faced by historic cities. According to cultural ecology, culture is deemed as an organism in the ecological system, which will change with the environment. This research, taking the Shichahai historic district of Beijing as an example, discusses how local culture changes in response to urban renewal and globalization. Shichahai historic district holds the largest land and population of all the 25 protected districts of history and culture in Beijing. The local culture of Shichahai is representative of Beijing culturel, which is a conbination of royal culture, celebrity culture and civil culture. The local culture here is a kind of “recreation culture”. In fact, Shichahai area has been known as a commercial district and a recreation district since the Ming Dynasty. All the people, both the rich and the poor, can have fun in the same place, and this make Shichahai so special compared to the other parts of Beijing. The research result shows that the traditional characteristics of local culture in Shichahai are fading away. Furthermore, as we find from the survey, the participants of current culture (owners and customers of the bars) are not local people. There is a lack of communication between local culture and current culture. This research also finds that foreign culture will change itself in order to adapt to the new environment. Finally, this paper put forward some suggestions for reconstructing the local culture of Shichahai, that is to protect the material environment, develop characteristic cultural industry and keep the original social networks and life style.
The spatial patterns of the tourism land of Ciqikou ancient town in Chongqing from 1998 to 2009 are established through household survey. Great changes have taken place in the spatial pattern of the tourism land of Ciqikou throughout the years from 1998 to 2009. The period of 2005 to 2009 sees the most rapid increase in tourism land. The early stage witnesses the dominance of some big businesses which occupy lands with comparatively large units, and later, small businesses play a more and more important role. From the spatial pattern, it can be found that the early tourism lands concentrated from the north to the south along the main street and that pattern gradually evolved into a balanced layout that expanded to the outside streets. Tourism and catering business, shopping and entertainment are the three of the most important functions in the Ciqikou historical and cultural block, but the importance varies in different periods. Considering the number of businesses, tourism and shopping is the most important tourism function. As for the land use, catering function exhibits evident advantage in different periods except the period from 2002 to 2005. Moreover, the land for tourism and catering evolved from a scattering pattern to a pattern concentrating in both parts of the south and the north. The function of catering shows a trend of expanding to the streets outside the center. The land for tourism and shopping concentrates on the southern entrance of the historical block. The land for tourism and entertainment comparatively concentrates in the middle of the block and the northern area along the river.
This study is based on almost all of the papers focusing on the relationships between tourism and environment- resources, from two tourism scientific SSCI journals and four journals in environment and resources field. They are Annals of Tourism Research (ATR), Tourism Management (TM), Environmental and Resource Economics (ERE), Ecological Economics (EE), Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM) and Journal of Environmental Management (JEM). According to these papers, we make a detailed analysis on the trends in tourism -environment relationship research and we come to many other significant conclusions. We have divided all the papers into four groups according to four topics, namely tourism resource valuation, tourism sustainability and ecotourism, tourism -environment -resource relationship, and tourism -environment -resource management. At present, about one-third of study cases are related to tourism resource valuation, but the valuation lacks theoritical foundation. Valuation methods vary a lot but they are used singly, without even shallow integration. So theoritical fondation thickening and method-integration are a meaningful task. And cultural tourism resources valuation is lacking. For China, the big country rich in its cultual heritage resources, cultural tourism resources valuation can be significant. Contents enrichment and quantification research on tourism sustainability and ecotourism should be the research focus in the near future. About the tourism-environment coupling relationship, we should consider the effects of environment on tourism industry or tourism activities. Relationship between tourism and climate change is another focus in future studies. Meantime, we cannot ignore the research on tourism impacts on the environment. Tourism-environment management, tourism taxation, environmental taxes and environmental or ecological certificates also need further-in-depth research. Besides, topics need furtherbroadening and more perspectives should be considered. The final purpose of tourism development is effectively managing the tourism environment -resources to achieve sustainability goals. Research on tourism resource valuation, sustainability and ecotourism, tourism-environment- resource relationship and tourism environmental management is favourable to solve the imbalance between tourism and environment-resources. Tourism sustainability is a long-term difficult job, and we should make every effort for tourism-environment management optimization.
The study on relationship between trade and CO2 emission will make the origin sources of CO2 emission more distinct and will be helpful to policy making of CO2 emissions reduction and replying the global climate change problem. By mean of the framework of non-competitive input-output models, this article sets up a relationship model for CO2 emissions of anthrop industrial activities between two regions by the way of decomposing the economy activities into exporting, importing, consumption and investment combined with a sensitivity analysis. Then the authors calculate the CO2 emissions induced by consumption, investment, export and import in 2007 in China respectively. A sensitivity analysis is also carried out. The conclusion is that the augment of export and the improper of export structure is the main reason for the rapid increase of CO2 emission gross in China. Especially, in the year of 2007, the CO2 emission induced by net export accounting for 29.1% of Chinese gross CO2 emissions. And the huge investment in domestic building, a great deal export and investment in mahinery, transport and electronics equipment, the domestic consumption of service, electric and heat power, eating, the large amount export of metal and chemical products are the main origin sources and highest emission elasticity economic activities in the perspective of complete consumption. So it is an efficient way as well as a key task to change the export structure, expedite the international transfer of high energy-using industries, and promote the industrial technology and add-value of export products. At the same time, advocating civil emission reduction, and making great effort to build a conservationminded society, especially cutting down the waste from building industries and service energy uses are also important measures for the energy saving and emission reduction in China.
This paper aims to explore the relationship between the fluctuations of climate change identified by annually fluctuations of air temperature and precipitation during the study time period and the changes of grain production at counties of China by using panel data models, based on survey data across all counties in 31 provinces (except for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau) for the four time periods of 1988, 1995, 2000 and 2005, which consists of climate variables, social and economic variables and geophysical variables. The estimation results show that the average impacts of air temperatures and the precipitation are positive. However, based on panel data models regressed at the scale of different provinces, marginal increases in temperature and rainfall have very different effects on grain production in different regions. Warming is beneficial to the North China, Northwest China and Northeast China; in contrast, higher temperatures are harmful to grain production in the South and East China. More rain is likely to be beneficial to the Northeast China, Northwest China and Central China, but will harm farmers in the remaining regions. Marginal increases in temperature and rainfall have very different effects in different seasons. For example, there aren't distinct impacts of spring temperature on grain production. However, based on the panel data model consisting of seasonal climate variables, results suggest that the average higher temperature in summer and winter is negative for grain production in China, but drastic raise of temperature in summer and winter is beneficial to grain production. In contrast, the impact of average autumn temperature is opposite to that of summer and winter. Except for the impacts of rainfall in spring and summer on grain production, the impacts of rainfall in other seasons on grain production aren't distinct. The results suggest that social factors and geophysical factors may affect the grain production to a certain extent as well.
Risk is usually defined as the product of the probability and the consequence, so seismic economic loss estimation is an important component of seismic risk analysis. What's more, a reasonable loss estimation is a foundation and basis for the government to take earthquake risk prevention management measures. Therefore, how to accurately estimate the economic loss caused by the earthquake has important theoretical and practical significance. This paper reviews the development process of seismic economic loss estimation at home and abroad. The evaluation methods of direct and indirect economic loss caused by earthquake are summarized. The existing difficulties to use the model to estimate the seismic economic loss and problems to be solved are also pointed out. Seismic economic loss comprises two parts: direct economic loss and indirect economic loss. Direct economic loss generally refers to the decrease in physical property, including the damage of buildings, indoor property and infrastructure. Generally speaking, the research on direct seismic economic loss estimation, domestically or internationally, has already formed stable and systematic methods, but the problem is that it is still unable to integrate overall socio-economic entirely into seismic economic loss estimation. Indirect economic loss often consists of loss from factory's production interpretation, inter-industry loss, and the loss due to breaking the equilibrium state of the original economic system by seismic disaster. The research on indirect seismic economic loss estimation at home and abroad is still in the stage of constant exploration and improvement due to many reasons such as the wide range of affected areas, long time of impact and recovery, and the complex linkages among the economies, which result in that the indirect seismic economic loss estimation can't provide a more accurate result. Finally, this paper discusses the prospects for the development of study on the seismic economic loss estimation in the future.
Built-up land expands with China's economic growth, while it is not utilized efficiently. This study takes capital, labour and built-up land as input factors, and gross domestic product (GDP) as output factor to analyze the technical efficiency of each province from 1997 to 2007 by adopting input-oriented CCR model with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The research results show that the average technical efficiency of most provinces is low, which is consistent with their economic development levels. By calculating the average technological efficiency of each province during two periods of 1997-2002 and 2003-2007, it is found that the technological efficiency in 21 provinces during 2003-2007 is lower than that during 1997-2002. This tendency is in coincidence with the accelerated development of the heavy industry and the chemical industry during 2003- 2007. There is an evidence that the inputs of capital, labour and built-up land are slack,which means those inputs are relatively excessive and not allocated appropriately.
After the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, USA, more and more airline companies in USA adopted the hub-and-spoke systems. Flights from different origins to the same destination or from the same origin to different destinations were consolidated via intermediate nodes instead of direct interlink. Compared to traditional many-to-many network, these configurations reduce and simplify network construction costs, centralize commodity handling and sorting, and allow carriers to take advantage of scale economies through consolidation of flows. O'Kelly presented the first recognized mathematical formulation for a p-hub location problem by studying airline passenger networks in 1987, and the wide application of hub and spoke network motivated the geographers' study on it. The hub location problem is concerned with locating hub facilities and allocating demand nodes to hubs in order to route the traffic between origin-destination pairs. In fact, hub location problem is a complex mixture of location analysis and spatial interaction theory. The hub location problem can be classified to four fundamental types of discrete facility location problems: the p-median problem, the hub location problem with fixed costs, the p-center problem and the hub covering problems. The hub and spoke network was mainly used by airline company, so the research also focused on the application to airlines. Moreover, it can also be applied in maritime transport system, telecommunication systems, post service or rail systems and so on. Few researches on hub and spoke can be found in Chinese literature, so the model constructing and application are the main subjects for further research.
Rail transportation has been considered to be one of the most importment modes of transportation at present. And, the promotion of accessibility of railway can play an importment role in imporving interprovincial social-economic communications. In the paper, provincial capital cities are assumed to be the nodes in the railway network, and taking weighted average shortest travel time between provincial capital cities in 2003 and 2007 as target, the evolution and spatial pattern of interprovincial accessibility are measured and contrasted before and after the 5th and 6th train-speed network upgrading. Results show that, through fifth and sixth upgrading, the accessibility level has been greatly improved all over the country, and particularly, the accessibility promotion are higher in west provinces than the others. The stepped spatial pattern of the accessibiliy level that reduces gradually from the east coastal provinces to the northwest provinces in China has appeared. The scope of the accessibility central zone is expanding gradually, and the primary railway line are becoming stronger and stronger. On the contrary, the accessibility variation are increasing from the east coastal provinces to the northwest provinces, and the zone along the railway from the Lanzhou to the Urumchi is becoming the zone with the maximum accessibility variation. The significance and function of railway upgrading to the promotion of accessibility and the strengtherning of regional social-economic communication are confirmed objectively by analyzing the evolution and spatial pattern of railway accessibility.
The paper discusses the spatial behaviors and driving mechanism of the ethnic migrations based on extensive field investigation and GIS spatial analysis, taking Hui and Dongxiang ethnic groups in Lanzhou as examples. It is concluded that: (1) The source of minority migration in Lanzhou has a distribution pattern of spatial aggregation. Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture and Zhangjiachuan Hui Autonomous County are the main sources, accounting for 56.47% of the total. (2) It has the characteristics of “living around the temple, working around the temple”. The spatial living pattern of “big gethering and small groups” has been formed to meet the needs of survival and adaptation in urban areas. (3) In the driving forces of minority migration, there are “the pushing forces” such as geographical environment, and socioeconomic gradient caused by regional differences and “the pulling forces” such as urban agglomeration and diffusion, traffic accessibility, the homogeneity of ethnic groups in different regions and the convenience of religious activities. The research results have an important practical significance for promoting the harmonious development of urban ethnic relations, urban planning, population management and community development.
The phenomenon of low level of income and high level of consumption appears in the county towns of developing areas in rural China where plenty of migrants out-flow in recent years. This relationship between income and consumption looks like contradictory, which does not accord with the principle of economics and is difficult to get an explanation. In this paper, taking Lujiang as an example, the authors try to analyze and explain this phenomenon based on geographical viewpoint. They find that the out-flow of migration is the most important reason which lead to the low income and high consumption. Moreover, some special groups and traditional cultural customs are also important reasons. The model of Lujiang shows that in the developing areas of China, the opening and marketing of rural system can eliminate the urban-rural division which is the result of planned economy.
As various resources have been developed by human-beings in river basins and the conflict between human and land has been increased, the research on man-land relationship areal system in a river basin becomes important. The paper constructed evaluation indexes system for evaluating the man-land relationship areal system in river basins by selecting 40 indicators related to socio-economic sub-system and resource-environment sub-system. After using analytic hierarchy process to determine index weight, the coupling status of the man-land relationship areal system in the Weihe river basin from 1996 to 2006 has been analyzed empirically by using a dynamic coupling model for the harmonious development based on the system theory. The results show that the socio-economic level in the main stream basin of the Weihe River has increased its volatility from 1996 to 2006 accompanied with the fluctuations of resource -environmental state. The resource -environment sub-system shows repeated fluctuations with deterioration and improvement in turns. The research shows that the coupling degree in the man-land relationship areal system increases rapidly in the Weihe River basin. At present, the man-land relationship areal system in the Weihe River basin is at an over-exploitation phase. Also, the crisis of resource-environment is in the incubation period. If we do not pay attention to environmental protection and go on to overexploit resources, the situation will get worse quickly. At that time, the growth of economy and the increase of consumption of resources will overwhelm the resource-environment system and lead to continuous decrease of environmental quality. Then the relations between the two systems will be deteriorated, and also the socio-economic development will be constrained. The system will enter a phase of negative growth. So it is crucial to adopt proper socio-economic development mode to realize the coordinated development in the Weihe River basin.
With the global development, physical geography affected by “cultural turning” in the whole geography field has changed a lot in its research method, research focuses and main issues in order to cope with the more and more serious conflicts among population, resources and environment. And many researches seemed to be within physical geography with more cultural features. This paper, taking “cultural turning” as a perspective of the innovation of physical geography, explains the background of cultural physical geography from the aspects of research objects and contents in physical geography. Then the paper describes three research lines of cultural physical geography which are the holistic studying perspective, the perception and imagination of environment and the studies on culture factors, based on which this paper explores that researches on human settlements, environmental image, environmental ethics as well as landscape restoration and environment design should be carried out by physical geography as its cultural issues. Finally, the paper emphasizes that physical geography will have further innovation under the affection of cultural turning, but meanwhile it is also very important and necessary to maintain its original disciplinary nature, target and methods.
Remote sensing technology has been used in a wide range of applications, but the mixed-pixel phenomenon has been a persistent problem. In traditional classification, every pixel is considered a pure pixel and can be classified as only one type. This affects the accuracy and precision of results in applications. Recently, the problem has been studied by many researchers who have adopted many models and methods to decompose mixed-pixels and reconstruct super-resolution images from the low-resolution originals. In this article, we give a literature review of the development of mixed-pixel decomposition and super-resolution reconstruction. In accord with the main flow in the process, three aspects are reviewed: (1) endmember selection, (2) abundance estimation, and (3) super-resolution reconstruction. Endmember selection aims at selecting pure objects in the whole image range. Statistical methods and geometrical methods have been covered in detail for endmember selection. Abundance estimation of endmembers in pixels is another vital step attracting a great deal of research. It involves a number of new models and methods. We put an emphasis on variable endmember spectral mixture analysis and blind sources separation methods, which perform well and seem promising. Super-resolution reconstruction is based on the result of abundance estimation. How to maximize the spatial auto-correlation is the main objective when reconstructing super-resolution images. We review the most commonly used pixel-swapping method at length and discuss some problems presented in the study. Finally, some suggestions are brought forward for the mixed-pixel decomposition and super-resolution reconstruction of RS images.
Since the 1990s, spatial statistics has been emerged as an innovative and important method in human geography, especially in urban and regional studies. This method is valued at understanding socioeconomic elements based on their intrinsic spatial dependency. By deciphering the spatial dependency, it modifies conventional statistics, with geographical information systems on data storing, management, visualization and analysis, to improve knowledge of understanding urban and regional space. Allowing for the requirement of urban and regional studies, the paper introduces the main concepts, principles, techniques and problems when spatial statistics is applied. The paper is particularly interested in three main application trends: exploratory spatial data analysis, local statistics, and spatial statistic modeling. With the purpose of properly applying the method of spatial statistics, it is argued that applicants should pay attention to spatial scale, spatial weights, edge effects and ecological fallacy. The paper further reviews the application and progress in the themes of economic agglomeration, land use and urban structure, transportation and real estate by addressing associated application values. It is pointed out that the application of spatial statistics will strengthen the analysis at micro-levels but will need high resolution data set.
