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  • 2018 Volume 37 Issue 9
    Published: 28 September 2018
      

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  • Reviews
    Ping WANG, Xuejing ZHANG, Tianye WANG, Sergey P POZDNIAKOV
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    Diurnal water table fluctuation is considered the evidence and indicator of groundwater evapotranspiration by phreatophytes in arid areas. Based on the relationship between plant evapotranspiration and diurnal water table fluctuation, White proposed an analytical solution for estimating evapotranspiration rates using groundwater level monitoring data, i.e., the White method. Due to its simplicity and limited data requirements, this method has been widely used to estimate plant evapotranspiration in riparian zones of arid areas. In this article, we first introduced the fundamentals and four assumptions of the White method, and uncertainties that are involved in its application. Then, we reviewed the recent developments in the method, and discussed the main characteristics, limitations, and shortcomings of each modification; on this basis, the principle of further improvement of the White method is proposed. At present, combined with multi-scale observation and simulation of land surface evapotranspiration, the White method can be used not only to estimate regional scale groundwater evapotranspiration, but also to provide a reference for investigating water sources for plant use in arid regions.

  • Reviews
    Xiaohong CHEN, Honghao ZHOU
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    The relationship of urbanization and ecological environment has become an important research field in the study of regional human-environment system. Based on the data of research topics related to urbanization and ecological environment retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases from 1999 to 2016 and using Excel, SPSS, and CiteSpace software, this study drew the visual knowledge maps based on co-occurrence analysis, co-citation analysis, detection of burst terms, keywords co-occurrence analysis, and multidimensional scaling analysis. (1) The research frontiers gradually moved from the relationship between urbanization and single factors of the ecological environment system to the comprehensive research of multi-factors, and shifted from single effect to interactions within and between systems. (2) Under the background of rapid urbanization, land use change, ecosystem services, climate change, landscape patterns, and eco-environmental effects have become the focus of recent research. (3) There is a lack of interdisciplinary research on the use of integrated methods of new technologies in a multi-scale perspective. Finally, we present the prospects of future study, which include research on the patterns-processes-mechanism of the relationship of urbanization and ecological environment, transregional multi-scale research, environmental effect of urbanization and influencing factors, formation and regulation of ecological environment problems in the process of rapid urbanization, and sustainable development of urbanization and ecological environment. These prospects and reviews would help to offer revelation and reference for relevant research in China.

  • Reviews
    Chuanyan AN, Tongsheng LI, Zhouyan ZHAI, Qiang FU
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    Based on research articles selected from the core journals and the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) journals in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) academic journal network publishing database and with the help of CiteSpace software, this study analyzed the authors, cooperative institutions, and keywords on China's rural tourism research literature published between 1992 and 2016 and found that China's rural tourism research has not formed close research teams and scholars have low recognition of each other's work. Research cooperation networks are loosely organized between academic institutions. The whole process of research can be divided into four stages: emerging stage (1992-1998), preliminary diversification stage (1999-2005), rapid diversification stage (2006-2012), and in-depth study stage (2013-present). With regard to the research contents, policy guidance is clear—the research topics closely followed the national policy change and showed diversity. The research focused on the economics of tourism from the beginning and there exists a large number of research articles on development strategies and models. The researchers have been insisting on ecological ideas all the time. Overall, economics, sociology, geography, agronomy, and many other disciplines have been involved in this field. The main value proposition changed from the consumer to the whole population, showing the trend of comprehensive humanistic care in rural tourism research. Moreover, in recent years, the researchers have introspected and actively exercised the discourse power to participate in the real business of rural tourism. According to the actual situation of development of rural tourism in China and its research characteristics, multidisciplinary, multi-technological, and multi-organizational studies will be carried out in view of rural tourism problems and more research on the philosophical foundation, basic concepts, and basic theories of rural tourism, transformation and upgrading of rural tourism, land use in the development of rural tourism, social and spatial questions of rural tourism in the context of the new urbanization in China, and development strategies of rural tourism diversity will become the key points of future research.

  • Reviews
    Shuying ZHANG, Jiaming LIU, He ZHU, Tao LI
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    As a form of sustainable tourism, ecotourism has attracted a significant amount of attention from scholars. Based on the academic publications collected from the Web of Science Core Collection database, this study reviewed 546 selected documents, and analyzed corresponding key research areas and methodologies. This study also examined the multiple aspects of ecotourism in terms of connotations, stakeholders, tourist source markets, tourist destinations, impacts, and assessment. The results show that the characteristics of international research on ecotourism are application oriented, with distinctive resource features of research area and broad thematic coverage, interdisciplinary, and diverse perspectives. Six directions for future research in China have been proposed to improve and optimize ecotourism research taking into consideration international experiences, which include improving the theoretical framework of research, handling the relationship among different stakeholders properly, summarizing patterns of ecotourists' behaviors, extending research scales and management modes of destinations, emphasizing research on the effects of ecotourism, and optimizing evaluation methods.

  • Reviews
    Yinfeng XU, Degen WANG
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    The impact of traffic on urban spatial structure has been a key research area of urban geography and transportation geography research. China has entered the era of the high-speed rail (HSR) network, and the impact of HSR on urban spatial structure has become the focus of attention in domestic academia. This study is based on the related literature of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) from 1999 to 2017. First, the general characteristics of research on the spatial effect in urban space of HSR are summarized from four aspects: changes in the annual number of publications, distribution of journals, core authors, and geographical distribution of authors' affiliated institutions; Second, the progress of research on urban spatial effect of HSR are summarized from four aspects: the HSR effect on urban accessibility, the HSR effect on urban economic development, the HSR effect on regional urban spatial structure, and the HSR effect on urban interior spatial structure. At last, prospects of the future development of urban geography in the era of HSR network are examined with regard to research perspective, content, and disciplines.

  • Articles
  • Articles
    Xiaomeng WANG, Jin WANG, Dianting WU
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    The interaction of production factors among cities plays a significant role in the spatial expansion of urban agglomerations. Meanwhile, it drives the change of urban agglomerations from a single-level flat regional space into a multi-level network system. The shift of Chinese urban agglomerations from segregated regions to spatial networks has become the focus of academic research in recent years. Studies have advanced an argument that the relations of traffic and industry between each city-pair not only provide internal dynamics for the spatial expansion and hierarchical organization of urban agglomeration, but also describe the development state of urban agglomeration. Based on the perspective of coupling relationship between traffic and industry, this study identified the multi-level spatial structure and development scope of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration by spatial network analysis, gravity model, and Multi-level Spatial Structure Tree (MSS-Tree), using socioeconomic data, traffic volume data, and enterprise network data. We first selected the municipal districts of Beijing, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, and Tangshan cities as four radiation centers based on the result of comprehensive strength calculated by factor analysis. Then we combined the gravity model with the MSS-Tree algorithm, and the result shows that continuity, hierarchy, and difference coexist in the theoretical spatial structure of the urban agglomeration. Meanwhile, we applied traffic volume data and enterprise network data to the MSS-Tree algorithm, and the result shows that current spatial structure presents the characteristics of fragmentation, hollow, and jumping, which is quite different from the theoretical structure. According to the comparison between the current scope and the theoretical scope, the current development scope is smaller, and there is obvious an "island and cave" phenomenon in the radiation area of radiation centers, which show contiguous distribution of metropolitan shadow areas. For the four radiation centers, there is a lack of mature sub-centers around Beijing; the spatial scale of radiation area around Tianjin is shrinking greatly because of the polarization effect of Beijing; and the radiation areas around Shijiazhuang and Tangshan are poorly developed, indicating that the two cities need to strengthen their own economic construction. Further, the comparison between traffic and industry radiation areas reveals the phenomenon that traffic develops first while industry lags behind. The unbalanced coupling relationship between traffic and industry leads to low coincidence degree in radiation areas of these two factors. The leading role of traffic accelerates loss of production factors from small or medium-sized cities, thus forms the poverty belt around Beijing and Tianjin. From the perspective of traffic-industry coupling relationship, this study explored the existing problems and their mechanism, which is significant for efficient synergy in the spatial development of urban agglomerations. Finally. Based on the perspective of local government, this article proposed regional development strategies of integration from bottom to top and expansion from inside to outside.

  • Articles
    ZHAO Pengjun, LIU Di
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    The relationship between infrastructure supply and socioeconomic development in towns is one of the key research themes in the fields of urban planning and urban geography. This relationship is a vital issue for urban planning practice and development management of towns. It is widely believed that a lack of infrastructure is one of the key factors impeding social and economic development in China's towns. However, empirical research supporting this argument is stull scarce. In particularly, an analysis at the national level is missing. This study aimed to fill the gap by using recently collected survey data from 121 towns in China. It applied grey associative analysis to identify the relationship between infrastructure and socioeconomic development in these towns. The facts, major factors, and the mechanisms for the relationship between infrastructure and socioeconomic development were analyzed. The results show that: (1) Infrastructure and socioeconomic development are significantly related with each other. The effects of socioeconomic development on infrastructure supply are stronger than the effects of infrastructure on socioeconomic development, which contradicts previous understandings; (2) The relationship between socioeconomic development and infrastructure is influenced by local economic contexts. For example, the correlations in the towns located in Northeast China are more significant, and the correlations in the towns far from megacities are stronger than those near these cities; (3) Population size and industry type also influence the relationship between the two systems. Correlations in towns with a small population or tourist towns are stronger than medium-sized towns while commerce-leading towns show greater correlations than industry-leading towns; (4) When the development quality or level is taken into account, for many towns, low level of infrastructure supply and low level of socioeconomic development coincide. In towns located in eastern China or towns that have a moderate distance to megacities, high level of infrastructure supply and high level of socioeconomic development occur at the same time; (5) For towns with a low level of socioeconomic development and infrastructure supply, insufficient infrastructure supply plays a more important role than insufficient development of socioeconomic sectors. This situation particularly happened in towns in eastern China or towns located near megacities. These findings have strong policy implications for the future development and construction of towns in China.

  • Articles
    Qiong SONG, Xinzheng ZHAO, Tongsheng LI, Jingyu LIU
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    Urban system is one of the core subjects of human-economic geography. From the perspective of directed-multivalued relation, taking the Zhongyuan urban agglomeration as the case study area, a comparative study on spatial structures and influencing factors of multiple urban networks—static network, Baidu information network, and comprehensive transportation network—will provide a new train of thought for urban system research under relational transition. This study analyzed the hierarchical structure and the node structure of the networks of the Zhongyuan urban agglomeration, to extract generality and particularity of the three networks mentioned above. Furthermore, we built a relational regression model with the help of the quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) method to dissect the influencing factors of these three networks, from the aspects of economy, culture, administration, and time distance. The empirical results are as follows: (1) The correlation coefficients of the three networks are over 0.582, presented as Baidu information versus comprehensive transportation > Baidu information versus static > Comprehensive transportation versus static, and the overall similarity is stronger than the difference. (2) Integrating the three networks, the Zhongyuan urban agglomeration, a mononuclear spatial structure cored by Zhengzhou, consisted of two regional development belts along with the Beijing-Guangzhou railway and the Lianyungang-Lanzhou railway, and formed a central area with obvious advantages of radiation and concentration with a backbone network constituted by Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, Xinxiang, Luoyang, and Xuchang. Outside of the central area, the three networks showed obvious particularity. The radiation and agglomeration ability of cities have negative correlation in static network, while showed positive correlation in Baidu information network and comprehensive transportation network. (3) The seven influencing factors have different effects on the three networks. Enterprise cooperation, industrial structure similarity, and economic system proximity lead to the similarity of the three networks. Meanwhile, income gap, cultural similarity, administrative affiliation, and average time distance lead to their differences.

  • Articles
    Weixuan SONG, Yuzhu MA, Yanru CHEN
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    Under the background of rapid urbanization and housing market reform, urban housing and housing price have become a major issue related to the national economy and people's livelihood in China. The spatial differentiation of housing prices has become an important topic of research, which has been concerned by Chinese urban geographer and economic geographer in recent years. Few of the existing studies in China relied on long time series data to compare the spatial pattern, location influencing factors, and mechanism of change of urban housing selling and rental prices. As Nanjing City can represent the general development path of China's big cities, this study took 4560 residential communities in Nanjing as the total sample, and collected the average housing selling and rental prices for 30 quarters of 2009-2017. Data analyses show that there is a causality between the selling and rental prices, and the selling price shows a clear pattern that "fast rise" alternates with "relatively smooth," price levels whereas the rental price shows a more stable trend. The study chose areas where the sample communities are concentrated as focused research area and 6 characteristic time intervals to analyze the spatiotemporal differentiation and characteristics of change of housing selling and rental prices by employing the Kriging interpolation method. The results show that the spatial differentiation of housing selling price significantly intensified and high-value areas are more concentrated in Hexi New Town, Jiangxinzhou, and elite school districts in Gulou District; and based on the current situation of development, the high-value areas continue to transfer to the periphery of the city. Meanwhile, the spatial pattern of rental price shifted from gradually decreasing from city center toward outskirts to a more balanced structure of multi-centers both in the old and the new city areas. On this basis, an indicator system of location influence coefficient on housing selling and rental prices was built, focusing on the characteristics of houses and the "location" property. Through multiple stepwise regression analysis, it was found that central geographical variable has the highest degree of explanation power on selling and rental prices, while the explanatory power of supporting services on selling and rental prices is decreasing. With rapidly rising housing selling price in Nanjing, the significance of normal "location" coefficient on housing price differentiation is continually abating, but the decisive effect of some special "location" coefficients (such as school district and policy preferences) on selling price is becoming more prominent, further expanding the price-to-rent ratio, which also indicates the overall increase of housing price "risk" in Nanjing.

  • Articles
    Lifan SHEN, Chun ZHANG, He LI, Ye WANG
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    The spatial span of residents' job-housing places is increasingly expanded with urban sprawl. The diversity of commuting modes and improvement of commuting efficiency will affect commuters' previous job-housing imbalance. Commuting time as cost of commuting will contribute to better analyzing job-housing condition from commuters' perspective. Based on the statistical method of Bayesian-tobit and individual survey data of 7 sub-districts in Beijing, this study examined the interaction between four kinds of commuting modes (slow traffic, automobile, urban rail transit, and bus) and job-housing imbalance. Meanwhile, this study set employment accessibility and land use mix as moderator variables and explored their impacts on the relationship between varies commuting modes and job-housing imbalance. The study findings indicate that: (1) There is a negative relationship between commuting mode of slow traffic and job-housing imbalance. (2) By contrast, there is a positive dependency among automobile, urban rail transit, and bus and job-housing imbalance. (3) Employment accessibility and land use mix would weaken the original relationship among slow traffic, urban rail transit, and bus and job-housing imbalance. Specifically, under relatively low employment accessibility and land use mix conditions, the job-housing imbalance degree of slow traffic commuters is lower, while the job-housing imbalance degree of urban rail transit and bus commuters is higher. (4) Nevertheless, the relationship between commuting modes and job-housing imbalance will not be affected by employment accessibility and land use mix. These results suggest that (1) worse condition of employment accessibility and land use mixt can alleviate jobs-housing imbalance of commuters who use slow traffic. (2) However, lower value of employment accessibility and land use mix degree will aggravate job-housing imbalance of commuters. (3) In addition, the commuting behavior of automobile users will not be easily influenced by external factors.

  • Articles
    Hanqing LI, Wen YUAN, Mingqing MA, Wu YUAN
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    Traditional industrial agglomeration research methods based on macroscopic statistical data use mostly administrative divisions as spatial statistical units, and it is difficult to reflect the spatial continuity of industries. The emergence of enterprise data sets on open data platforms makes it possible to study industrial agglomerations at the micro level. This study collected industrial and commercial registration data of manufacturing enterprises in the Pearl River Delta region and adopted a distance-based index system and nuclear density analysis methods to analyze the manufacturing clustering characteristics of the Pearl River Delta region in 2008 and the manufacturing aggregation growth based on increments from 2008 to 2014. Based on the analysis, the following conclusions are drawn: The Pearl River Delta region's manufacturing industry is concentrated in five cities, including Shenzhen, Foshan, Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Zhongshan, in northwest-southeast direction. The manufacturing density of the surrounding cities is relatively low. The degree of agglomeration and industry attributes are closely related—technology-intensive industries have the highest degree of agglomeration, capital-intensive industries have the highest degree of dispersion, labor-intensive manufacturing industries have a weak concentration, and resource-intensive industries have no obvious agglomeration or dispersion characteristics. The number of newly established enterprises increased from year to year in 2008-2014, and there were significant differences between different cities. Among them, the newly established manufacturing enterprises in Shenzhen have decreased year by year, the newly established manufacturing enterprises in Dongguan, Zhongshan, and other places have increased significantly, and other cities have remained stable or increased slowly. The newly established manufacturing industry has gradually shifted its focus from Shenzhen to Dongguan and Zhongshan. Among them, the proportion of technology-intensive manufacturing enterprises has decreased, while the number of labor-intensive manufacturing enterprises has increased. The agglomeration index also shows the same trend, indicating that technology-intensive manufacturing and labor-intensive manufacturing is undergoing structural and spatial changes.