：Cities are the most concentrated area of production and consumption activities of the human race, which brings about great amounts of energy consumption and carbon emissions. Therefore, low-carbon city is widely discussed by scholars around the world. In this study, 22 indicators in five areas, including low-carbon development, low-carbon economy, low-carbon environment, city size, and energy consumption, were used to establish an evaluation system for low-carbon city. Remote sensing images of the DMSP-OLS Nighttime Light sets and PM2.5 concentration inversion image were innovatively included in these indicators. Using factor analysis, cluster analysis, and spatial correlation analysis, 284 cities in China were classified as low-carbon cities, comparatively low-carbon cities, comparatively high-carbon cities, and high-carbon cities in 2006 and 2010. The result shows that the low-carbon status of these cities generally improved in 2010 as compared to 2006. According to the driving forces of city development, these cities were divided into four types: environment-oriented, people-oriented, urbanization-dominated, and industry-dominated. Spatially, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, the Yangtze River Delta region, Shandong Province, and the Pearl River Delta region had the aggregated effect of low-carbon city development. Chongqing, Chengdu, and Wuhan were distinguished from the periphery cities that had lower level of low-carbon development and belonged to the hotspot cities of advanced low-carbon development in Southwest China. Low-carbon development of cities is affected by the administrative level and industrial transformation of cities, among other factors.

Under the background of socioeconomic transition and urbanization in China, regional disparity of urban poverty attracts increasingly more attention of Chinese scholars. Based on poverty data from 352 cities (including prefecture-level cities, prefecture-level districts, autonomous prefectures and leagues) from 2007-2011, this study examines the spatial evolution and distribution of urban poverty, as well as the differences between poverty and economic underdevelopment in China. During the five years between 2007 and 2011, the total number and ratio of urban poor have slightly increased. At the regional level, urban population in poverty and areas where poverty situation has aggravated increased sharply in the western region. Most cities in the eastern area have improved in poverty concentration, while the majority of cities in the western area have deteriorated over this period. At the city level, small cities, resource-based cities, and minority population concentrated cities have also deteriorated. In 2011, poverty ratio showed an increasing trend from east to west. Small and medium-size cities, resource-based cities, and minority population concentrated cities had higher poverty ratio. In resource-based cities in the northeast, there were high poverty ratios but the per capita GDP was high, and the areas were characterized by an "invisible urban poverty". In minority population concentrated cities in the southwest, there were low poverty ratios with low per capita GDP, and the areas were characterized by a "low poverty rate urban poverty". In the future, anti-poverty policymaking should take into consideration location, development condition, and demographic characters of cities. Anti-poverty policies should focus on small and medium-size cities, resource-based cities, and minority population concentrated cities in areas where the urban poverty situation is aggravating and balance the relationship between urban poverty reduction and economic development.

In recent years, living environment of urban areas in China is attracting increasingly more attention of researchers and urban residents particularly due to the problems caused by rapid economic development. Meanwhile, improving living environment quality is becoming an important target of urban development for the Chinese government. In spite of the increasing number of studies on living environment at smaller scales, few studies have focused on the city scale. Based on a large survey conducted in 2014 in 43 cities of the Bohai Rim area, this study used multilevel modeling, GIS spatial analysis, and multiple linear regression to evaluate the living environment using residents’ subjective perception as indicators, then analyzed the impact of city characteristics on the heterogeneity of the evaluation results. Several conclusions are drawn as follows: (1) There is a significant disparity of evaluation results between the 43 cities. The differences of influencing factors at the city level can explain 20% of the total satisfaction variance. The disparity of living environment quality of cities cannot be neglected in related research on the social, economic, and development issues of cities. Cities in Liaoning Province ranked the highest in the evaluation result while cities in Hebei Province were the worst due to the concentration of massive heavy industries, especially the steel industry. (2) Environment health is the main problem for all the cities that ranked low in the evaluation, which reaffirms that the key point to improve living environment quality is to control environment pollution. (3) Cities with larger land area and population and higher economic development levels normally ranked the lowest with regard to residents’ satisfaction. Satisfaction on living environment is higher in small and medium-sized cities as compared to large cities. Residents living in coastal cities are more satisfied than inland cities. (4) At present, smog control and reduction is key to improving the quality of living environment in the Bohai Rim area.

This study analyzed the provision and regional difference of four major indoor facilities in residential housing, including tap water, kitchen, toilet, and shower, in Chinese households. Quadrilateral chart method was used to calculate the composite index of provision and regional difference of provision was discussed based on the result. Causes of the detected differences were examined by correlation analysis. At last, policy recommendations were made based on the research findings. The study found that at the county level there was a remarkable regional difference in the provision of the four types of residential housing indoor facilities in China. Their comprehensive conditions differed spatially between the southeastern and northwestern parts of the country as divided by the Hu Huanyong Line that runs from the northeast to the southwest. The composite index values were high in the southeast and low in the northwest. The southeastern part was mainly charactered by very high, high, and medium level provisions. The northwestern part was chiefly featured by low and very low level provisions. There existed significant differences between the eastern, central, western, and northeastern regions. Among the four regions, internal difference was the largest in the eastern region and smallest in the northeastern region. Level of economic development, household income, degree of education, and urbanization rate were important factors influencing the provision of indoor facilities in residential housing.