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There is a large amount of population moved from countryside to cities in China during its urbanization in the past two decades. The majority of these people have no formal qualifications for city residency, and they are so-called ‘floating population’. The increase of this group of people has induced the pressure of land use in cities, and the contradiction between the demand and the supply of urban land has been intensifying particularly in those developed regions in China. This paper examines the impacts of floating population on urban land by presenting the interrelations between floating population and urban land expansion from the perspective of production land and living land. Structural equation model (SEM) is employed in conducting the analysis. The result shows that the floating population alone does not have direct effect on urban land expansion, but have indirect impacts through engaging in the production or living process. It is particularly interesting that floating people's living conditions have no direct positive effect on the increase of construction land. Based on the research results, suggestions are offered for improvements in government policy towards a more sustainable and integrated urbanization, including the provision of housing support, the formation of more urbanized society and sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, Chinese cities have been experiencing significant suburbanization with massive numbers of people moving out of city centers. Facing this background, this paper aims to identify the typology of residential resettlements in suburban areas, and analyze the mechanisms of each residential resettlement via archive studies, census tracks and field research instead of the traditional macro-demographic approach. Five types of resettlement are identified, comprising public housing districts for poor people with housing difficulties, low-end private housing districts for lower socio-economic people, multiple housing districts (containing public housing and low-end private housing) for displaced shantytown residents, and villa areas for the wealthy. This suburban residential resettlement pattern is generally different from that in Western cities, which is largely attributed to the Chinese governments' monopoly of land supply and public service provision. It is also concluded that the state power, capitalist actors (e.g., developers and private enterprises), and other professionals (e.g., planners and architects) have become the Chinese characterized ‘pushing’ factors and actors in driving the typology of suburban resettlement housing in the context of urbanization era of China. Besides, the five typology of resettlement housing has brought about socio-spatial consequences including a spatial mismatch for lower socio-economic groups in suburban areas, which may lead to the formation of poverty belts around Chinese cities. This may provide important implication for understanding the residential resettlement in other developing countries with similar context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, our cities are increasingly expected to become more sustainable urban forms, with many added determinants. A multitude of city concepts has therefore been contrived. The most time-honored and prominent concept is the “sustainable city,” which is depicted as a model urban form and thereafter more city concepts have come into being. However, it is not clear for all the concepts, for instance, “eco-cities,” “smart city,” “sustainable city,” and “resilient city,” what are the underpinning building blocks within each concept and how these concepts correlate with each other. This bibliometric study organizes this in conducting a descriptive summary, a clustering analysis, and multidimensional scaling of major city concepts, by establishing a co-word matrix of high-frequency keywords occurring in the Science Citations Index (SCI) and Social Science Citations Index (SSCI) databases. In addition to summarizing the evolution of these concepts, it analyzes the composition of each city concept and the core issues addressed by each city type. Also investigated are the correlations between the city concepts with a statistical analysis of the clusters of literature in one concept that overlap or connect to other clusters in another. From this, it is shown that, under the two umbrella terms of “sustainable city” and “smart city,” the “? -city” literature has developed in a variety of distinctive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant cause of economic recession and environmental change that has attracted the extensive attention of researchers and policy-makers worldwide is the land urbanization bubble (LUB) – a rapid and catastrophic growth and decline in urban development fueled by a mixture of misplaced exuberance and speculation. It is also an important topic for sustainable urban development and urban renewal, and is of particular interest to China, as one of the countries with the largest amount of urban land, most drastic change, and most prominent land urbanization conflicts in the world. This study analyzes the characteristics and presence of dynamic change in LUBs during China's urbanization process through a case study of the changing space-time rules in Hangzhou in Zhejiang province over the years 2004, 2007, 2010, 2015, and 2020. Based on a literature review and analysis of the mechanism driving Hangzhou's LUBs, we design a method for their classification and measurement. This reveals the existence of an overall 18.24 km2 LUB in 2010 and a predicted 40.62 km2 LUB in 2020. Locally, the Jianggan and Yuhang districts are expected to have a higher LUB risk by 2020, the Bingjiang and Xiaoshan districts a medium risk, the Shangcheng and Xiacheng districts a low risk, and the Xihu district having no LUB risk. Finally, three policy recommendations are proposed in consideration of Hangzhou's economic development and land use characteristics, comprising (1) reducing LUBs by promoting intensive urban expansion, (2) reducing the possibility of LUBs by building a market-oriented control system for construction land expansion, and (3) the dynamic control of LUB risks by differential regulation of the expansion of urban construction land. • These identified LUB areas are classified into two categories in this paper, including controllable LUB uncontrollable LUB. • This research found no LUBs in 2007 and 2015, but with an 18.24 km2 LUB in 2010 and an expected 40.62 km2 bubble in 2020. • The concept of LUB risk was introduced and calculated in this paper for decision makers' reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In recent years, there has been rapid urbanization worldwide, resulting in both benefits and problems. Sustainable urbanization has become an important aspect in promoting sustainable development. Existing studies have introduced various methodologies to guide urbanization towards sustainable practices. The application of these methods has contributed to improving urban sustainability. To further support the effective applications of the principles of sustainable urbanization, a tool is needed to evaluate whether a particular process of urbanization is sustainable. In this paper, we introduce an alternative model for evaluating sustainable urbanization by investigating the relationship between urbanization and urban sustainability. The practice of sustainable urbanization is defined as a dynamic process that enables urban sustainability to improve or to maintain a certain level of practice. By employing this definition, we introduce a sustainable urbanization elasticity coefficient eSU , which is defined by two parameters: urbanization velocity (VμR ) and urban sustainability velocity (VμS ). The sustainability of an urbanization process is measured by the value of eSU or read from the VμR –VμS coordinate. A case study demonstrates the application of the measure eSU and the VμR –VμS coordinate. The proposed model is an effective tool to help policy makers understand whether the urbanization processes they support are sustainable and thus whether to correct practices. The model also allows comparison of different urbanization practices and thereby encourages the sharing of successful experiences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Urban agglomerations are considered as significant space typologies in the post globalization & digitalization era. The spatial linkage intensity of cities in urban agglomeration is an important basis for evaluating the development and compactness of urban agglomerations. The requirements associated with the major national strategy to achieve the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region and the research methods made possible by Big Data in the Internet era have created the realistic possibility of revealing the strength of spatial networks and the spatial differentiation rules of urban agglomerations. This study uses Web Crawler to obtain 500,000 sets of Weibo data in 13 cities of the BTH urban agglomeration. Three criteria and nine indicators are used to construct an index system and a model to quantitatively evaluate the strength of spatial networks in the BTH urban agglomeration. The results show that spatial network connections between cities in the urban agglomeration are not strong overall, reflecting the limited development of urban agglomeration; the spatial networks in the urban agglomeration have hierarchical and centralized characteristics, which reflect the imbalanced development of the city network; Beijing, Tianjin, and Shijiazhuang are the centers of the social network connections in the BTH urban agglomeration, which means that Weibo's online space reinforces the existing urban system; there is a positive correlation between network spatial connectivity and the hierarchy of cities in the urban agglomeration, where cities with higher levels would have more urban network connections; Generally, Weibo network connections are stronger than economic or transport links between the cities, and the development of information technology may reduce the disparity of regional development. This research innovatively uses social network big data to reveal the strength of spatial network connections and spatial differentiation rules in the urban agglomeration. The methodology provided in this paper is systematic enough for generalization. • The spatial linkage intensity is an important basis for evaluating the development and compactness of urban agglomerations. • We construct a new index system using network big data to measure the strength of connection between cities. • The methodology can be applied to other regions when examining social network big data from Facebook or Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]