Because the new cultural geography has been overemphasizing representations, symbols, and discourses, some scholars argue for the deployment of non-representational theory and re-materializing, aiming to shed more lights on everyday life, immanence, practice, and affect, which are transient, progressing, and difficult to be presented by textual representations. The new paradigm also suggests to highlight the performativity, mobility, affective atmospheres, and meanings of symbolic exchange of matters and materiality, thus encouraging new cultural geography to pay more attention on the topics of emotion, body, practice, performance, and everyday life. This article summarizes the general situations and essential concepts of non-representation and re-materializing, and discusses the related issues, including body, identity, and the construction of space; affection and atmosphere of space; body, performance, and its meaning; and power and network. This study tried to attract more attention of Chinese researchers to the embodied, perceived, and immediate geographical elements, and promote innovations in the research methods of new cultural geography.
The article "Formation and dynamics of the 'pole-axis' spatial system" by Lu Dadao marks the maturity of the "pole-axis" theory. Using the method of citation analysis, this study analyzed the 349 citations of this masterpiece from the aspects of citation numbers, authors of the publications, journals, research focus area, discipline, research themes, and motivations of citation, in order to comprehensively review the application of this famous Chinese geographical theory. The results show that since 2002, the rate of citation of the "pole-axis system" theory has been on the rise. The research topics focused on regional economy and tourism development. The research cases were mainly at the provincial and municipal scales with single research area, and focused on four hotspot regions: the Northwest Silk Road Economic Belt, the Northeast Liaoning Economic Circle, the Southwest Tibet-Yunnan-Sichuan-Chongqing area, and the Eastern Yangtze River Delta region. The quality of research is generally high, with the characteristics of interdisciplinary application, but the studies lack critical examination and creative improvement of Lu's theory. Based on this, we present an outlook on the future development of the "pole-axis system" theory from the perspective of expanding research and practical applications, hoping to provide some references for scholars in related fields, as well as to point out the possible application directions towards achieving more innovative results in regional development.
In the context of global climate change and urban expansion, urban floods frequently cause serious social problems and economic losses. Flood risk assessment as the main content of urban flood management has received extensive attention. This article first presents the conceptual framework of urban flood risk assessment and the function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. It then reviews their main research contents respectively, analyzes the strengths and limitations of different research methods in the perspective of urban flood risk management. We conclude that the development trends of urban flood risk assessment include the following four aspects: 1) With regard to flood hazard evaluation, developing the two-dimensional hydraulics flood inundation model incorporating different sources of floods in urban areas such as pluvial, fluvial, and coastal floods is imperative for urban flood risk assessment. 2) Exposure evaluation is moving towards more refined and dynamic evaluation with the support of big data and GIS. 3) Vulnerability assessment is shifting from the quantitative evaluation of the physical dimension to multi-dimensional assessments, such as social, economic, cultural, environmental, and others. 4) In addition, semi-quantitative and quantitative urban flood risk assessment combined with climate change and urban expansion considerations under multiple scenarios is also an important component of future urban flood management.
After the Second World War, financial globalization, an important component of economic internationalization, has become a key characteristic of the global economic development. Offshore financial centers are developed under the background of financial internationalization and innovation, and play an important role in promoting development and change of capital organization and emerging markets. Because of their unique geographical distribution and important role in the global economy and financial system, geographers have begun to study offshore financial centers. In this article, we reviewed the literature on offshore financial centers in geography. We first introduced the related concepts and changes, then examined the following topics: the location and development conditions of offshore financial centers, their regional and global influences, the interaction between offshore financial centers and the global financial system, and their development in China. Moreover, we discussed how to research offshore financial centers from a geographical perspective in the future.
In remote sensing research, night light remote sensing as an important branch of active development has attracted increasingly more attention from the fields of natural and social science research in recent decades. Different from traditional daytime optical satellite remote sensing that obtains ground object radiation information, nighttime light remote sensing is the acquisition of visible-near-infrared electromagnetic information transmitted from the Earth's surface under cloud-free conditions at night. Compared to the ordinary satellite remote sensing images, ground light intensity information recorded by the night light images directly reflects the difference of human activity. Therefore, it is widely used in urbanization research, extraction of impervious surfaces, estimation of socioeconomic indicators, major events assessment, ecological environment assessment, and other fields. At present, although research results based on nighttime light data are continuously accumulating, there is a general lack of systematic review of these results and the current reviews suffer from incomplete coverage and poor timeliness. Therefore, this article summarizes the research results of nighttime light data in recent decades and examines them from the aspects of data processing and technical approaches, urbanization application research, and parameterization. Finally, we identify the following three research hotspots: multi-source data fusion, application expansion, and short-period surface light monitoring.
Climate change with warming as the main characteristic has important influence on crop phenology. Rising temperature usually leads to faster crop growth and shortened growth period that causes loss of crop yield, which is not conducive to agricultural development. Meanwhile, crop phenological changes can reflect climate change directly or indirectly, which has important significance for detecting climate change. Research on crop phenology is crucial for preventing agricultural meteorological disasters, the progress of agricultural production management, and the safety of agricultural production. With the continuous increase of global surface temperature, research on crop phenology has attracted increasingly more attention of scientists. Based on the key research methods of crop phenology, this article summarizes the studies on the change of crop growth period and the main driving factors of change of major crops, including wheat, corn, rice, cotton, and soybean, in recent decades in China. The following conclusions are drawn: 1) Statistical analysis methods have been most widely used and several other methods were combined with statistical analysis methods in application. Model simulation method has also been widely used in phenological research, and such method is easy to operate. Remote sensing inversion has a high requirement on the characteristics of the growth period, and the focus is generally on green-up period of spring crops. 2) Overall, the whole growth period of wheat is mainly shortened, and the main trend of whole growth period of maize and rice is prolonged. 3) The driving factors of main crop phenological change is climate change and agricultural management. Climate change is the dominant driving factor, which decides crop phenological change, and adjusting agricultural management measures can partly offset the negative impact of climate change on crop growth period. The study of response and adaptation of crop phenology to climate change can provide an important theoretical basis for agricultural production to adapt to climate change.
Ecosystem services (ESs) are closely related to human well-being and regional sustainable development and play a fundamental role in regional land use planning. Therefore, this study used the bibliometric analysis and the textual analysis methods to examine the application of ES concepts, methods, and related key words in land use planning research and plans since 1997. The results show that in recent years, academic research has paid increasing attention to the application of ESs in land use planning. The number of publications and the citations of relevant papers have steadily increased over time. A total of 121 papers and 2252 citations were identified in Chinese literature for the period 1997-2017. Meanwhile, the total frequency of key words related to ESs is rising in the General Plan for Land Use (GPLU) texts from the national level to the provincial capital level. The frequency of key words related to ESs in the GPLU grew from 14630 in 1997-2010 to 25467 in 2006-2020, with a growth rate of 74%. In addition, the planning texts included more concerns on the provisioning and supporting services than the regulating and cultural services. In the future, we suggest that more effective methods should be developed to apply ESs to planning practice and more attention should be paid to the regulating and cultural services to serve the construction of ecological civilization.
This article aims to analyze the determinants and mechanisms of network power and position of cities for developing urban network theory and improving urbanization policy in China. Data on headquarter and branch locations of the largest 500 listed companies in China in 2016 were subjected to ownership linkage model to approximate the urban network, resulting in a 294×294 valued urban network. Three conclusions are drawn: 1) Outdegree centrality presents a dual core spatial structure, betweeness has a primate distribution, and indegree centrality is a multi-core system. These three measurements of centrality have a strong spatial correlation, and the cities with high centrality values are densely concentrated in the traditional urban agglomerations. 2) City attributes such as market potential, key resources, location condition, and business environment have a significant positive impact on the centrality of urban network, and the sensitivity of different centrality characteristics to various types of influencing factors is different. 3) Selecting superior actors, preferential attachment, and geographical proximity are the dynamic mechanisms in the expansion of urban network space in China, which will further strengthen the power of cities with traditional advantages. The Chinese government must actively respond to the possibly increasing gap between cities under the network environment and promote the cooperation between cities on a larger spatial scale.
In the era of globalization and network society, more city governments launch to market themselves through the Internet to attract talents, capital, and technology in order to promote economic development. In this regard, academics began to do research on how cities use their official websites to market themselves. In most cases, the marketing contents on cities' official websites are significantly different and further research on the causes of dissimilar marketing contents indicates that city characteristics correlate to the selection of website contents. In some cases, city governments market themselves with contents conforming to their current situation. However, other empirical studies argue that sometimes city governments may also market themselves with contents completely dissimilar to their factual features. Therefore, how city features correlate with the selection of official websites' marketing contents has attracted international academic attention. In previous studies, Chinese scholars generally focused on analyzing the specific marketing strategies and consequent effects of different cities' marketing strategies but recently, some researchers have started to use quantitative methods to analyze the correlation between city features and their marketing strategies. However, as city features involve diverse aspects including economy, politics, society, and culture, the presumption that all city characteristics significantly correlate with the selection of marketing contents has overlooked the differentiated significance of city characteristics. In this sense, with quantitative methods including cluster analysis, principal component analysis, and multiple comparison tests, this research analyzed the main types of marketing contents on 28 Chinese world cities' official websites and the correlation between city characteristics and marketing content selection. The conclusions are as follows. First, the marketing contents on the websites of Chinese world cities can be categorized as four main types including politics and culture, administrative and information, services, and landscape and environment. Second, the marketing contents of Chinese world cities significantly correlate with economic globalization, tertiary industrialization, unemployment rate, political status, and economic growth rate. Moreover, the correlation between city characteristics and websites' marketing contents is influenced by political circumstances and the long history and rapid urbanization process of China. Third, living condition and tourism, economic scale and public budget, passenger transport capacity, income, population growth rate, and land area all play an insignificant role on marketing contents, indicating that it is oversimplified to assume that all city features significantly correlate with marketing contents when analyzing the causes of the diversity of marketing contents on cities' official websites. In other words, the correlation with marketing content selection might significantly differ across different types of city features. This research may contribute to recognizing the city features that have strong correlation with world cities' marketing contents, which can be taken into consideration by other Chinese globalizing cities when selecting contents for their official websites.
India is a developing country with a population only smaller than China, and is an important location of the Belt and Road Initiative. India is in the process of rapid urbanization and studying the urbanization characteristics of India is of great significance for understanding urban expansion globally. But within China there are relatively limited studies and reports on urbanization and urban expansion in India. In this study, we selected 10 Indian cities with more than 1 million people, and obtained the land use and population data of these cities based on the Landsat images in 1990, 2000, and 2014. The built-up density in each ring was calculated after the cities were divided into equidistant concentric rings by using the concentric ring analysis method. A multi-dimensional comparative analysis of urban expansion was conducted for these India cities through growth rate, density, intensity, and landscape indices. The results show that: 1) Urban land expansion is faster than population growth. The average annual growth rate of urban land is 3.27 and 2.43 times of the average annual growth rate of the population. 2) The density of urban land is decreasing with the distance from the city center and it quickly decreases within the urban core area. Temporally, urban land density gradually increases in the same concentric ring over time. Cities have expanded outwardly in a dispersed manner, and urban forms have become scattered, especially in the second period (2000-2014). 3) The degree of fragmentation of urban land is consistent with the spatial variation of urban expansion intensity. Areas with the most active urban expansion and the most severe landscape fragmentation shifted outward over time, and urban expansion has a significant impact on the landscape pattern. In the context of global urban expansion, this study provides an Indian sample for understanding the spatial and temporal characteristics of urban expansion and also provides analytical methods and ideas for studying urban expansion in other regions.
When China enters the "urban era," the environmental and social problems brought about by rapid urbanization have posed a serious threat to urban residents' physical and mental health outcomes. Urban health problems have become an important concern both in academic circles and in the public sphere. As an indispensable dimension of health, mental health is an important prerequisite for achieving "good life." In Western urban studies, the last decade has seen an acceleration in research examining the close relationship between urban environment and mental health outcomes. A growing body of literature has reported significant impact of neighborhood characteristics on residents' mental health, such as housing condition, green space, and neighborhood social support, among others. In China, however, mechanism of mental health associated with neighborhood environment remains poorly understood. This article systematically explores the direct impact of neighborhood environment on mental health, which helps to promote the "Healthy City" and new urbanization strategies. Based on the data collected from a questionnaire survey involving 23 neighborhoods and 1,150 respondents in Guangzhou City, this research employed the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and multilevel linear regression models to examine the surveyed residents' mental health and its determinants. It particularly focused on the extent to which and the ways in which neighborhood built and social environments influence their residents’ mental health status. The results indicate that mental health status of residents living in different neighborhoods was significantly different. Multilevel modeling shows that residents' mental health is influenced by both individual and neighborhood factors. Regarding individual variables, low educational level is negatively related to mental health. Residents with housing property rights have better mental health outcomes than those without housing property rights. In addition, good physical health condition contributes to better mental health status. After controlling for individual variables, the impact of neighborhood environment is still significant. For variables related to the built environment, residents living in neighborhoods with abundant facilities and parks around have better mental health outcomes. With regard to neighborhood social environment, high neighborhood interactions and adequate community groups lead to better mental health status, but community disputes can negatively affect mental health of residents. This study confirms that neighborhood characteristics have significant influence on mental health in Guangzhou City, China, which provides valuable implications for policies and practices seeking to promote residents’ mental health. First, facilities and parks should be taken into consideration in neighborhood design and city planning. Another useful approach to improving mental health is for community committees and residents to make joint efforts to build a cohesive and supportive neighborhood, including enriching community groups and strengthening neighborhood interactions.
Haze problem is becoming increasingly more serious in China. Improving walkability of cities to increase outdoor physical activities of urban residents may also increase their exposure to air pollution, and the health effect is not necessarily positive. In view of this paradox, by taking Nanjing City as an example, this study measured walkability and simulated air pollutant concentration based on a land use regression model and spatial interpolation. It then compared these to evaluate the health effects of the built environment. The calculation of the walkability score includes three steps: 1) Assign weights and distance attenuation of the concerned service facilities, based on which the basic walkability score of the point of interest (POI) is obtained. 2) Obtain the single-point walkability score of the POI, considering the impact of the walking environment. 3) Obtain walkability score by spatial interpolation. It was found that the walking index of the main urban area of Nanjing City showed a multi-center axial attenuation pattern. PM2.5 and O3 were selected as representative air pollutants for concentration simulation for their significant hazard. The concentration of PM2.5 was mainly simulated by establishing a regression model with relevant geographic variables, and the O3 concentration was simulated by spatial interpolation because it showed different characteristics in space. The result indicates that there is a large area of high walkability and high pollutant exposure. These areas are mainly distributed in the urban center. In such areas, it is risky to emphasize the improvement of walking activities through modifying the built environment to promote health. The area of low walkability and low pollutant exposure is mainly distributed in the suburbs, and it is difficult to directly assess the health effects of such areas. Health-promoting area of high walkability and low PM2.5 concentration is mainly distributed around the city's large green areas. Areas of high walkability and low O3 concentration are distributed in the second circle of the city center but not inside the center. Therefore, the surrounding area of green space that is close to the city center but not at the center is more likely to become space of high walkability and low pollutant exposure, which has positive health effects. On the other hand, the semi-urbanized areas at the junction of urban and rural areas tend to become space of low walkability and high pollutant exposure because industrial expansion does not match the lagging service provision. Such areas have negative health effects. The results can provide a reference for the accurate formulation of land use policies for healthy cities.
