This article addresses the complexity of human geography, which is comprehensive and frequently interactive with other scientific disciplines. Economic, social, and ecological issues are core subjects in the development of human geography discipline, with technological drivers as one of its new features. Sustainability concerned and technology-oriented are two new characters of human geography in a fast-changing world, and the discipline is being reshaped by advanced technologies. Under the background of rapid economic and social changes and technological development, human geography will interact more with issues of industrial location, social equity, ecological factors, as well as information technologies. Future developments may include: theoretical innovations that give individuals more central place than before; technological innovations based on spatial data analyses; new application models that integrate emerging industries; and conceptual innovations that that place great emphases on ecological and environmental factors. Proposals on how to realize these changes are also presented, with new approaches to neo-location theory, spatial and space customization, and geographical format introduced.
This paper is a mainly pragmatic response to utilitarian criticisms of the humanities. It first outlines political, public and practical fronts on which the humanities are under assault, identifying critics and their conspirators. Then, as a part of its defence of the humanities it expounds some of their central strengths. These range from the philosophical to the practical: lending critical perspectives to knowledge production, enriching lives, developing skills for uncertain and increasingly connected futures, improving science and supporting institutional income and credibility. Finally, the paper suggests that humanists must not only continue valuable conceptual and empirical disciplinary work but must add the very defence of the humanities to professional activity.
Volkswagen's industrial brand world Autostadt in Wolfsburg is a showcase of the world car industry's technical and social evolution since more than a century. It is, however, sanitized as to its own history during Nazi Germany from the late 1930 to 1945: Darker facets, such as forced labor and weapons production, are documented in a small museum in the factory proper. The brand world, however, gives millions of visitors the impression that the company's history only starts in 1945. Bright sides are celebrated, uncomfortable events excluded. The standard jeep used by the German army, for instance, the country's first car produced on a Fordist production line, based on what later became the famous people's car, the beetle, is neither mentioned nor exhibited. Thus, while reflecting important feats, processes and components of the automobile industry as a whole, its industrial heritage value is deficient.
Assessing the economic losses induced by disasters in complex industrial networks is fundamental for understanding the vulnerability and potential risks in industrial networks, and for making decisions on pre-disaster risk reduction and post-disaster reconstruction. From the perspective of disaster impact propagation in industrial networks, we systematically reviewed the types of disaster-induced economic losses and the remarkable research advances in recent years. The main method used in asset damage assessment is to establish the fragility curves between hazard intensity and damage degree of assets such as buildings, equipment, and inventory. For business interruption loss assessment, more research should be focused on production capacity loss rate (PCLR) of industrial sectors resulting from the physical damages of various input factors. Two distinctive analysis scales are often adopted for ripple loss assessment in industrial networks: micro-scale supply chain network and macro-scale industrial chain network. The former takes individual firms as basic units of analysis and utilizes complex network analysis to model the disaster impact spreading through inter-firm transactions and estimate the resulting supply chain disruption losses. In contrast, the latter considers industrial sectors or administrative regions as basic units and employs macro-scale econometric models, such as Input-Output (IO), Computable General Equilibrium (CGE), and so on, to simulate disaster impact propagation among industrial sectors or administrative regions, and evaluate the resulting gross output losses. Finally, from the perspective of scenario analysis, we proposed a multi-process, multi-scale integrated assessment methodology that combines hazard scenario, industrial network exposure, asset damages and business interruption losses at local nodes, supply chain disruption losses, and gross output losses, to comprehensively simulate the amplification effect of disasters in industrial networks.
The typical benggang has an amphitheater-like gully-head, mainly occurs in the deeply weathered granite area in southern and southeastern China. It usually consists of five parts: water-collection slope, headwall, colluvium, channel, and debris fan. From top to bottom, benggang headwall may be divided into four soil layers: topsoil, red soil, sandy soil, and clastic soil. Benggang in China and lavaka in Madagascar belong to the same type of landform with comparable geomorphologic characteristics. Benggang may be considered as one of the badland landscapes, but it has different erosion process. It is also different from the other two gully erosion landforms in Italy and Brazil: calanchi and vocoroca. Benggang is mainly distributed in moderate hilly region and subtropical maritime climate zone of southern and southeastern China. Usually benggang is also considered to develop from gully erosion, and it is treated as the advanced stage of gully evolution. The sediment yield of benggang channel erosion accounts for more than half of the sediment amount of the whole benggang gully catchment, and likewise the sediment yield of channel-bed accounts for about half of the sediment amount of the whole gully catchment. Simulated rainfall is a powerful tool to study the effects of rainfall on surface processes and erosion. The in situ artificial simulated rainfall is an effective method to study benggang erosion, slope runoff, and sediment transportation in benggang gully catchment. Benggang erosion is a geomorphic critical phenomenon. This critical phenomenon occurs only when the rainfall, topography, soil, and runoff exceed their critical thresholds. Field artificial rainfall experiments based on simulated rainfall-slope runoff-erosion process-sediment production observations may greatly improve the understanding of benggang erosion in southern and southeastern China. The sediment yield of benggang catchment may be estimated by the morphometric analyses on the topographies of benggang gully and debris fan
Rapid population aging has a broad and profound impact on the sustainable development of China's economy, and the country has implemented some policies and measures to tackle the problem of rapid population aging. Using ArcGIS 10.1, this study analyzed the spatiotemporal differentiation and influencing factors of population aging in Jilin Province by selecting the coefficient of aged population as the indicator of aging population. Data from the fourth, fifth, and sixth population census of Jilin Province were analyzed by using quantitative methods such as population gravity model, spatial autocorrelation, semi-variant function, and multiple linear regression. The results indicate that: (1) The difference of population aging in the counties and cities of Jilin Province is significant, and the progress is accelerating. The barycenter of population aging in had been moving from northwest to southeast of the province, but at a decreasing speed; (2) Through global spatial autocorrelation analysis, the population aging of Jilin Province presents a positive and enhancing spatial autocorrelation characteristics and trend; (3) Local spatial autocorrelation analysis indicates that the high-value areas of population aging cluster in the east of the province and low-value areas cluster in the west; (4) The spatiotemporal differentiation of aging in Jilin Province was mainly caused by structural factors, while random factors contributed less to the overall variation. In the other words, the spatial heterogeneity caused by spatial autocorrelation is more intense than that caused by random factors in the population aging. The eastern-western difference is the primary contributor to the spatial differentiation of population aging. (5) The main structural factors influencing population aging in the province were birth rate, per capita GDP, migration rate, and urbanization rate. The birth rate and per capita GDP factors have negative impacts on the population aging, however, migration rate and urbanization rate have positive impacts on population aging. Birth rate is the leading factor, and migration rate plays a key role in prompting population aging. Urbanization rate is increasingly more significant for population aging.
On 18 November 2017, a major fire broke out in Xihongmen Town, Daxing District, Beijing, where migrants are concentrated, killing 19 people and injuring 8 others. Of the victims, 16 were floating population from Shandong, Henan, and Hebei Provinces. In March 2014, the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the State Council distributed the National New Urbanization Plan (2014-2020). The new urbanization plan attaches great importance to the realization of "urbanization of people." Clarifying the characteristics and spatial patterns of floating population is an important prerequisite for promoting the urbanization of people and one of the core issues of the new-type urbanization initiative. Based on the survey data of migrant population health monitoring in 2015, this study explored the floating population's age, education level, employment, income, expenditure, and other characteristics, as well as the spatial distribution pattern of the source and destination areas in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration. The results show that the age structure of the surveyed migrant population was dominated by young and middle-aged workforce, showing a low level of education, predominantly agricultural population registration (hukou), and inter-provincial migration. The main reasons for the migration were employment and business activities. The income of the sampled migrants was mainly in the low and medium range, and the Engel's coefficient was higher than the average Engel's coefficient of the resident population. The sectoral distribution of the floating population was diversified, but mainly in the low-end commercial service industry. The proportion of those engaged in the wholesale and retail trade, resident service, repair and other service industries, manufacturing industry, and catering industry accounted for 70.7% of the total. The enrolment rate of health insurance was high, but the penetration of health education was low. In terms of the spatial distribution of inflow and outflow areas, the surveyed floating population mainly came from the provinces with similar geographical locations or large output of labor, such as Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Heilongjiang, and Anhui Provinces, which accounted for 70.75% of the whole surveyed floating population. The Beijing-Tianjin region was the major destination area of migrants, accounting for 37.76% and 29.11% of the total in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration respectively. Therefore, this article proposes to strengthen the social security and vocational training for migrants to improve the ability of migrants to integrate into cities, improve the openness and inclusiveness of cities, and enhance the sense of attainment and happiness of the floating population.
Based on the data for 35 cities of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta region, and the Pearl River Delta region from China's migrant dynamic monitoring survey in 2012, this study developed a series of indices to measure the degree of migrant integration in cites in the following five dimensions: economic integration, social integration, mental integration, institutional integration, and public service integration. It then calculated scores of these indices and a comprehensive score of migrant integration for the three major economic regions and 35 cities, and compared the results among these economic regions and cities. The results suggest that the comprehensive score of migrant integration is the highest in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, followed by the Yangtze River Delta region and the Pearl River Delta region. The degrees of migrant integration are uneven across the five dimensions in the same region: while the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta region, and the Pearl River Delta region have the highest score of migrant social integration, mental integration, and social integration respectively, scores of institutional integration, social integration, and public service integration ranked on the bottom in the three regions. On the whole, the work intensity of migrants in the three regions is high, their social contacts are limited within fellow migrants, and most of them are still uncertain about their long-term settlement intention in their destination cities. In all three regions many problems exist in implementing the institutional arrangements based on the residence card or temporary residence card for migrants, and in promoting migrants’ access to urban medical insurance. These problems prevent migrants from being fully integrated into the destination cities, and need to be overcome in relevant policy making.
Since the industrial revolution, mankind has started a mighty urbanization process. With the rapid development of traffic and communication technologies, cities continue to break through the original scale restrictions, getting increasingly larger. However, the number of cities in different scales is not equal. The larger the size of the cities, the smaller their number is, and the distribution of city population size follows the Zipf's law. In different development stages, the cities' rank-size differs. City nightlight data generally can be used to measure cities' economic activities, built area, population density, level of development, and so on. In this study, the nightlight data were used to represent the size of urban areas, and the size distribution of urban areas in China and the United States was examined on the national scale and the provincial/state scale. The result shows that at the national scale, cities in China and the United States have become more agglomerated from 2013 to 2016, while the distribution of the size of urban areas in China over the same period is more fragmented than that of the United States. There are differences in the rank-size distribution in different provinces. About 44% of China's provinces and 84% of American states have a zipf's index of more than 1. More than half of China's provinces show dispersed distribution of city size, while 84% of American states are agglomerated. In general, the size distribution of China's urban areas is more dispersed. The actual zipf’s index values of the high-order cities in China and the United States are much lower than the fitting values, and theoretically these cities have great potential for development. China's high-order cities need to be further developed to raise the agglomeration degree of urban economic activity, making China's urban system more mature.
Urban railway systems can reduce environmental footprints by residents' commuting and alleviate traffic congestion in mega-cities. Investigating the characteristics of the spatiotemporal distribution of passenger flows is significant in the examination of traffic demand in public transportation systems. Moreover, the study can help decision makers in traffic demand management. Taking the metro system of Beijing as an example, this study calculated the travel time of over 4 million trips and their origin-destination (OD) matrix. In the investigation of the spatiotemporal patterns, we found that: (1) travel time distribution of all trips and trips during the morning and afternoon peaks well fit with Gamma distribution; (2) patterns of passenger flows between districts or ring roads are symmetric; and (3) spatial inequity has been captured from the evaluation of average transit trips per person per day.
At present, the rural residential land "chaos" has attracted wide attention of the Chinese society, and scholars have carried out extensive research on the issue of rural residential land exit. As an external constraint, the environment of rural residential land exit has important impacts on farmers' willingness to exit their residential land. Based on the income space boundary location model theory, this study constructed the income space boundary location model of the external environment of rural residential land exit. Taking 84 rural residential land samples in Dongxihu District of Wuhan City in 2015 as objects, this article makes a systematic analysis of the regional differences in the comprehensive income of urban and rural residential land exit at the micro scale. The results indicates that: the comprehensive income of rural residential land exit is positive (B>0) in Urban-rural integration area, the external environment of rural residential land exit is relatively good there, and the willingness of farmers toward rural residential land exit is relatively high; the comprehensive income of rural residential land exit is negative (B<0)in central urban areas and remote rural area, the external environment of rural residential land exit is poor, and the willingness of farmers toward rural residential land exit is not high. The conclusions can provide some reference for the government to apply measures in line with local conditions in land use management and construct the urban-rural mutual support mechanism of rural residential land exit.
China's textile industry has gained encouraging achievements and become a primary industry integrating investment, production, consumption, employment opportunity provision, and foreign exchange earning. However, in recent years, influenced by its own developmental dilemma and instabilities in the global economic environment, weaknesses in its development have gradually surfaced. Enhancing its competitiveness and sustainable development capability by optimizing the layout of foreign investment and creating new development advantages will play an important role in the development of China's textile industry. On the basis of reviewing existing studies on foreign direct investment of domestic textile enterprises, supplemented by statistical information, field research, and interviews of senior managers, this article presents an analytical framework of spatial strategies of foreign investment of China's textile enterprises. This article also analyzes the spatial distribution and choice of industry of foreign direct investment of China's textile enterprises. At last, this article analyzes the difficulties and challenges of foreign direct investment and put forward spatially differentiated strategies for foreign investment of China's textile enterprises.
Vegetation index data based on satellite remote sensing have been widely applied in many fields such as vegetation monitoring and biomass estimation. However, the noise caused by the sensors, atmospheric conditions, and environmental factors affect the application of such data. Therefore, it is of practical significance to carry out research on the reconstruction of vegetation index. In this article, MODIS normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) datasets of 106 meteorological stations on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau with typical vegetation types, from 2000 to 2015, were reconstructed using three methods: cubic spline function (Spline), double logistic function (D-L), and singular spectrum analysis (SSA). Based on the results of phenological parameter extraction and NDVI time-series reconstruction, the ability of preserving the authenticity of the original data, detail fitting, and phenological character extraction of the three algorithms are compared and analyzed. The result suggests that there is no single method that performed the best for all types of vegetation, owing to the spatial heterogeneity of vegetation cover types and the varying denoising ability of the algorithms. D-L showed better performance for desert, shrubs, and woodland, which are heavily affected by random noise from snow and clouds, whereas for grassland and cropland, Spline had better performance. The fitting curves of SSA are below the D-L and Spline curves and the lower the NDVI value, the worse the reconstruction performance. With regard to maintaining the true values of the original data, Spline is superior to the D-L method for woodland, shrubs, and grassland, while the SSA is superior to the D-L function for woodland. The D-L method resulted in an earlier phenological period, Spline and SSA had a lagged outcome of the start of the growing season (SOS) and end of the growing season (EOS) respectively. Phenological index is unstable for shrubs and woodland and fluctuate irregularly for desert with all three methods, due to the low absolute value of NDVI. In addition, the phenology curve of spline is similar to that of SSA, and the SOS and EOS index derived from the D-L method is ahead of other methods for all vegetation cover types. The EOS extracted by the SSA method is larger than that by other methods for most of the vegetation cover types. This research could provide a reference for the selection of noise reduction methods for NDVI time-series data with different vegetation cover types in plateau vegetation.
The environment of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is harsh, but it is not a restricted area for life. Evidence suggests that humans have entered the plateau area during the last deglacial period, and formed relatively stable patterns of traffic routes through long-term practices. Through the construction of a natural factor simulation-site distribution correction method and using GIS tools, this study obtained the traffic route simulation results of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in the prehistoric period and verified the results with archaeological evidence. The plateau area is divided into four regions based on the simulation results, namely: the northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest regions. The routes site density of the northeast region is high and the number of sites falling into these routes accounted for 88.56% of the total number of sites in this area. The earliest routes were formed during the paleolithic period and are in the east-west direction. These routes and closely linked within the region and reach out to the Loess Plateau and the northern area of China. The formation and development of these routes laid the foundation for the spread of pottery, wheat, and millet and the emergence of the Silk Road. The direction of the routes is north-south in the southeast region. The northern part of the routes connects the upper reach of the Yellow River, and the southern part of the routes connects the Sichuan Basin and Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. The routes strengthen the cultural exchanges between the south and the north, and are the large corridors of national integration and communication. The southwest region is located in the center of the plateau. The routes of this area reflect the conquest of the main body in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The total length of the routes is about 4600 km and is the longest in the three regions. The routes are the second important corridor for humans to enter the plateau. The northwest region mainly consists of alpine desert and its natural environment is unsuitable for human survival, so the area is void of prehistoric traffic routes.
