Labor geography, which conceptualizes workers as social actors with agency rather than as a simple locational factor as seen in the neo-classical location theory, has become a thriving and important subfield of economic geography in the past two decades. However, labor geography received little attention in the literature of domestic economic geography despite the rising capital-labor contradiction having been challenging the marketization development in China. Attempting to provide a conceptual framework for the Chinese labor geography study, this article reviews the labor geography literature and identifies its emerging frontier questions. It first explains what labor geography is by examining the concept of worker agency and its spatiality. It then analyzes the progress of labor geography by focusing on the forms of worker agency and its formation mechanism, expounding their connections with space, place, global production networks, and social upgrading. The analyses show that labor geography has evolved from the narrow focus on collective forms of agency to the expanded one on variegated landscapes of agency that include worker individual social-spatial practices, and from the focus on the forms and influences of worker agency to the structurally territorial conditions that shape the possibilities of worker agency. It is suggested that there are four important issues for the Chinese labor geography study: (1) the variegated landscapes of worker agency in the context of the trade union institution with Chinese characteristics; (2) the potential impacts of labor agency on the restructuring of economic landscapes; (3) the embeddedness of worker agency in places where workers live and work in the context of China with specific institutional, economic, and social conditions; and (4) the institutional arrangements that contribute to social upgrading of workers. This article concludes by calling for the study of labor geography in China, which can provide a geographical perspective for understanding the Polanyian countermovement facing current China and policy implications for the inclusive development in the country.
With the rapid development of information and communication technology, the explosive amount of spatial big data creates both opportunities and challenges in the field of spatial analysis. Shortcomings of the traditional analytic paradigm for spatial process and spatial pattern analyses of network-constrained spatial point event have been revealed. Therefore, many studies have attempted to develop novel approaches for network-constrained point event analysis. In this article, we first conceptually defined network-constrained phenomenon and presented in detail the methodological framework of network-constrained point pattern analysis. Then we generalized the development status of methods of network-constrained point pattern analysis, including first-order effect method, second-order effect method, among others, and summarized the present situation of typical applications in the research of traffic safety, criminology, and other point events in urban context. In the end, current trends and future directions are discussed with regard to research methods and applications.
Feminist geography has been a very influential geographic research field in recent decades. Since women entered labor force in large numbers since the 1950s, urban development and urban planning were more concerned with the social and travel needs of professional women. Thus, studies on women's space-time behavior have drawn great attention from behavior geographer, transportation geographer, and urban planner. In China, although gender equality is believed to have been established since the 1950s, women began to face more challenges in their daily lives in recent years due to socioeconomic transitions. Gender inequality in many social fields is increasing, leading to more space-time constraints and gendered behavior to women. However, spatial behavior research of women in China is underdeveloped, which hinders an adequate understanding of the complex interactions between women's behavior and space. This article aims to put forward a framework for women's space-time behavior study in China. We first review the progress of women's space-time behavior research in Western countries. In early stage, such research focused on individuals' daily behaviors, such as the gender differences in commuting, non-work activity, and travel pattern, in the context of economic transition. Later more scholars became concerned with the household relationship and social inequality faced by women therefore more research on household structure, joint activity, and accessibility was conducted. Scholars have tried to interpret women's space-time behavior from different theoretical perspectives, including economic, sociological, and geographical points. All these efforts have contributed to establishing theories about women's daily life. Compared to their Western counterparts, Chinese women face some special social context, including more institutional and household constraints due to family planning, danwei transition, high proportion of dual-earner households, and emerging gender inequality. Finally, we propose a framework for women' space-time behavior study. We believe that household relationship, accessibility, joint activity, and differences among women should be studied carefully. We also indicate that theoretical studies on women' behavior should be emphasized in the future.
Based on data of self-assessed health of the elderly aged 60 years or older in 103 counties in Hubei Province from the population census of 2010 and population sampling survey of 2015, and using health rate of elderly (HRE) as indicator for the regional health level of the elderly (HLE), the spatiotemporal distributions and influencing factors of health level of the elderly population in Hubei Province are analyzed. The main results are as follows. The spatial differentiation of HLE is significant—high HRE regions are mainly distributed in urban districts of prefecture-level cities, followed by the central area of the province; and low HRE regions are mainly distributed at the peripheral areas. HLE distribution by county shows a significant positive spatial correlation. However, the degree of spatial agglomeration is falling as spatial difference of HRE increases. As a result, adjacent high HRE-high HRE counties mainly concentrated in Wuhan urban districts and neighboring areas, and adjacent low HRE-low HRE counties are mainly in the western, northeastern, and southeastern border areas of the province. Generally, the hotspot zones of HRE in Hubei Province remained in Wuhan urban districts and surrounding, and the opposite was found in the western, northeast, and southeast. After controlling for the historical factor, regional socioeconomic development level, natural environment factors, and socioeconomic status of elderly determine the regional health level of the elderly population in the province.
Rapid suburbanization has been an important issue in the urban and social transformation period of China. From the perspective of suburban resident individual activities, urban geography mainly focuses on commuting, leisure, shopping, and other daily behavior, but lack of research on individual mental health. Although mental health issue has been widely discussed in disciplines such as psychology, public health, and medical science, in most studies residents are considered as a homogeneous group, or simply divided by gender, age, income, and other social and economic attributes, and there is a lack of analysis on different spatial dimensions and built environment factors in various urban spaces. As such, based on the interdisciplinary perspective of health geography, this article concentrates on the mental health of suburban residents in the context of the market-oriented suburbanization. A total of 1029 resident samples in 11communities in Guangzhou City were selected for this study. Among these samples, 102 were from the suburban area and 927 were from the inner city area. A multiple linear regression model was used to examine the impact of the urban built environment and health behavior on mental health outcome, in order to reveal the public service inequality between inner city and suburban areas in the rapid suburbanization process. The results show that based on the WHO-5 indices, the average score of mental health of suburban samples was only 8.411 points, which was far lower than the average score of inner city samples of 12.788. Therefore attention should be paid to the mental health situation of suburban residents. The physical activities of the suburban residents are spatially and temporally constrained, which lead to an obvious poor mental health compared to the inner city residents. This health outcome differentiation is not only affected by the economic and social attributes of the individuals and neighborhood relationships, but also significantly affected by the built environment in different urban areas. For inner city residents, their health behaviors can be positively influenced by the high density of fitness facilities and land use patterns both in workplace and residence. However, for suburban residents who have to suffer every day from long-distance commuting and poor design and connectivity of public transport, their mental health outcomes are mainly associated with the built environment of residential community. Their fitness activities will be restricted by the low accessibility of urban public space and imperfect public transport system. This study could provide an important reference for the optimization of the land use structure and public services infrastructure in suburban communities for improving the health of the people living there.
This study evaluated Beijing metropolitan public service facility accessibility, use efficiency, and supply and demand mismatch using a massive amount of spatial data. Ratio and shortest time distance methods were applied to calculate public service facility accessibility. By employing the rank correlation and spatial overlay methods, this study analyzed the mismatch between supply and demand of accessibility. The results show that the overall facility accessibility is good in Beijing. Accessibility of all types of facilities is best within the 4th ring road, where the average shortest travel time from residential areas to facilities is lowest. Facility accessibility is worst between the 5th and the 6th ring roads, where the average shortest travel time is the longest among all zones. Residential communities with high demand and high accessibility account for the highest proportion. Residential communities with high demand and low accessibility are mainly located in the eastern and northern parts of the city between the 5th and the 6th ring roads, where facility accessibility needs to be improved. Among the four types of facilities, primary schools have the highest accessibility because primary and middle schools attached greater importance to equity in access. However, hospitals and shopping malls emphasized more on spatial efficiency. For the residential communities with high demand and low accessibility, measures should be taken to improve travel modes and public transportation routes and construct new facilities in order to solve the accessibility problem and address the imbalance between supply and demand.
Migrants play an important role in the process of China's urbanization. Therefore, understanding the determinants of their settlement intention is of great importance for making national new urbanization policies. Drawing on the livable cities survey conducted in 40 major cities in China, descriptive statistics and geographical detector methods were employed to examine the characteristics of migrants' urban livability perception and its effects on their settlement intention, respectively. The results show that: (1) Migrants' urban livability perception differs greatly between livability indicators—the ranking of importance is convenience of access to public facilities > comfort of natural environment > comfort of social environment > environmental health > convenience of transportation > security in the city. (2) Four dimensions of migrants' urban livability perception, including convenience of access to public facilities, comfort of social environment, environmental health, and security in the city, have significant effects on settlement intention with decreasing weights, but the correlations are not always linear. (3) Selected control variables, including migrants' relative income satisfaction, life satisfaction, perceived housing price, and geographic locations, and individual and family attributes such as age, gender, and occupation, also exert significant effects on settlement intention.
Environmental pollution is a major problem worldwide, subjecting people to serious health risks. Numerous studies on environmental pollution and health impact have been conducted, focusing on various aspects such as the associations between environmental pollution and health at the aggregate level, air pollution exposure and health effects based on daily travel behavior of residents, and environmental justice and health inequality. The environmental justice and health inequality research focuses on the adverse environmental impacts on the disadvantaged groups, such as the minority, children, people with low-level income, and migrants. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review on environmental pollution and health studies from various perspectives, and presents a diversified research framework to investigate the complexity between environmental pollution and health. Moreover, we propose that future research needs to link individual space-time behavior with environmental pollution and health, to explore the microscale or personal-level real-time air pollution exposure and its health effects based on the residents' space-time behavior trajectory. More research needs to be conducted to investigate the complex relationship between environmental justice and health inequality at microscale under different social and spatial contexts, in order to develop more just, effective urban/transportation planning measures and environmental health policies.
Eco-cultural health (ECH) is an important indicator of the sustainable development of regional natural-ecological and social-cultural systems. Taking Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province, China as a case study area, this study built an eco-cultural health assessment index system by focusing on the sustainability of the coupled ecological-cultural system. It then applied the index in the county scale evaluation through set pair analysis and information entropy methods. Status of ecological health and cultural health are jointly analyzed to conduct a corresponding strategic development zoning for the counties. The results show that, ECH in the western and northern parts of the prefecture was better than that in the eastern and southern parts. Yunlong County had the highest value of ECH, and Xiangyun County was the lowest. According to the eco-cultural health and its factors of all counties, the prefecture can be divided into four strategic development zones—eco-cultural synergistic reservation zone, eco-cultural balanced development zone, ecological restoration priority zone, and cultural development priority zone. This study may have important theoretical and practical significance in formulating a regional sustainable development strategy for the area.
Analyzing vulnerability and adaptation to drought is an important part of the study on human-environment relationship in arid and semiarid regions. It has also become the new viewpoint of human-environment system sustainability research in the rural areas of northwestern China. This research adopted the framework of vulnerability analysis proposed by Turner and adapted it for analyzing rural household vulnerability and adaptation to drought on the Loess Plateau. It integrated and analyzed meteorological data and questionnaire survey to examine household drought vulnerability and difference and inspected the uncertainty of the results applying Principal Component Analysis, Difference Analysis, and Robustness Analysis methods. This study also revealed the mechanism of adaptation to drought with regard to adaptive capacity, adaptation strategies, and adaptation mode. The main results include: (1) there exist significant differences between the villages in drought vulnerability index values—the vulnerability value of Zhonglianchuan is higher than that of Hongjia; (2) with regard to adaptation mechanism, exposure-sensitivity influences farmer income, farmer livelihood system determinates adaptive capacity, and differences in the type of household, livelihood strategy, land use, irrigation facilities, and policy support generate different adaptation modes and consequence; (3) the high frequency and narrow range of household drought vulnerability index indicates relatively high robustness of the result.
With the significant increase of social and economic interactions among constituent cities, city clusters have become the most striking geographic phenomenon in the twenty-first century. In the latest regional development strategy, city clusters have been positioned as the main spatial carriers of socioeconomic activities by the Chinese government. Although an increasing number of scholars has described the characteristics and proposed definitions of city clusters, there have been surprisingly few studies on the morphological change and influencing factors of city clusters' spatial structure based on population data. In most existing empirical studies on city cluster, instead of permanent resident population, registered household (hukou) population was used to measure city clusters' spatial structure and this introduces error. Hence, in this study we used two different sources of data-permanent resident population from the Chinese Census, and population of urban agglomerations released by the United Nations population division. Our sample is comprised of 13 city clusters.. Rank-size rule was applied to measure the morphological characteristics. The principal objective of this study is to examine the change and influencing factors of the spatial structure of Chinese city clusters. Our descriptive statistics show that there was a clear tendency towards polycentricity of city clusters during 1990-2010. Using two panel data analysis techniques (FE and FGLS) and different databases, we found that all else being equal, the spatial polycentricity of the city clusters is mainly associated with the increases of GDP per capita and population size. Most city clusters are in the stage of polycentricity, and only a few remain in the earlier monocentric stage. These findings have important policy implications for the development of urban clusters. For most city clusters with a polycentric tendency, the governments should promote integration within city clusters through transportation and regional coordination policies that strengthen the exchange of production factors and improve economic performance. For the few city clusters of monocentricity, however, the governments should avoid introducing polycentricity oriented policies too soon, which could be harmful to their economic performance. Due to methodological and data limitations, the endogenous problem between spatial structure and economic development is difficult to solve. The spatial structure of city clusters can be regarded as both a cause and a consequence of economic development. Hence, this two-way relationship might be correlative rather than causal. Further work should push forward in this regard to identify the real cause-effect. In addition, an increasing literature uses economic and transportation data to analyze city clusters from the perspective of functional linkage. This represents another direction that future research should focus on.
Grid population data can enable integrated analysis of population statistics with other spatial data on resources and the environment. Based on a Random Forest model and using nighttime lights, road network, surface water network, built-up area, slope, and DEM as control variables, the 2010 population data of the Pearl River Delta were distributed into 30 m grids. The estimation results were compared with three other public datasets. The importance of input variables was analyzed based on the results. The result shows that the accuracy of this simulation reached 83.32%, which is better than the WorldPop and the Population Grids of China datasets, and more close to the GPW dataset. Moreover, the 30 m resolution of our result furnishes detailed information of population density of the Pearl River Delta. According to the importance of covariates from the Random Forest model, strength of nighttime lights, distance to water, distance to built-up area, and density of roads are important factors in population distribution modeling in the Pearl River Delta. With the Random Forest model and multi-source data, high resolution population spatialization can be achieved. High spatial resolution grid data can provide important data source for high precision city management and policy making.
Marriage is an important social relation in the reproduction of population and it functions as maintaining social stability and harmony. Hence, the spatial pattern of regional divorce rates is an important topic in human geography. Taking 31 provincial-level administrative units as the research object and combining traditional statistical techniques and spatial econometric models, this article focuses on analyzing spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity of China's regional divorce rates between 2005 and 2014 and identifies the potential driving factors of regional divorce rates. The conclusions are as follows. (1) The regional inequality of divorce rates gradually decreased from 2005 to 2014, and there was a clear spatial differentiation with high divorce rates in northern China and low divorce rates in the southern region. (2) The spatial pattern of the divorce rates showed some spatial dependence or spatial spillover effect, which was influenced by both geographic proximity and the Cybersociety. The heterogeneous spatial differentiation of divorce rates was to some degree related to specific regional contexts such as economic development, culture, and population structure. (3) Spatial panel data regression reveals that urbanization rate, economic development, education attainment, popularity of the Internet, and family size all had significantly positive impact on divorce rate. Unemployment rate and the widening urban and rural income gap had insignificantly positive effect on divorce rate. Globalization, the increase of male to female sex ratio, and burden of family support were negative related to divorce rate, but not significant statistically.
