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A rich body of literature is stressing the crucial importance of migration and market evolution on the underutilization of housing in cities. Rural housing is unique given its less mature market structure. Drawing on an empirical case of Sunan, the work reported in this paper addresses underlying mechanisms of housing land underutilization in rural China. Employing a multi-level modeling approach, results suggest that the likelihood of underutilization relates to household and village features, such as family attributes, housing/parcel characteristics, type of villages, and geographical locations. Additionally, underutilization was also closely associated with regional contexts including local economic development levels and migration patterns. Theoretically, we conceptualized rural housing land underutilization as a land use transition with villagers' awareness of policy change possibilities in the context of both rapid urbanization and rural transformation with nested hybrid results. We argue that urban-rural differences do not induce underutilization. Rather, policy-induced overbuilding of new houses and insistence on retaining uninhabited older houses combined with the tendency for villagers’ to view investments as a mechanism to retain ties to their rural hometowns drove underutilizaiton.

This paper criticizes traditional models of urban–regional expansion, which depart from monocentric ideals of urban core and ring. The original spatial-cycle model (SCM) suggests repeating stages of urbanization, suburbanization, disurbanization and re-urbanization. We reconceptualize the relations between core(s) and ring(s) to test the formation of urban regions under mono-, multi- and polycentric trajectories. The analysis employs local population data in functional urban regions in Finland, Austria and the Netherlands, three countries with different urbanization patterns, for the period 1961–2011. Results suggest a ‘break of the cycle’ in polycentric regions and a shift towards a different period, which we call ‘syncurbanization’.

Regional integration is increasingly used as a policy strategy to accelerate urban development and regional cooperation. This research assesses the effects of regional integration on housing prices to evaluate policy effectiveness for small and medium-sized cities on the peripheries of core cities. Taking as a case study the Chinese city of Kaifeng—a contiguous city in the Zhengzhou megaregion—we utilized hedonic house price modelling and spatial econometrics to investigate the effect of Kaifeng’s integration with the core city on the dynamics and determinants of housing prices between 2001 and 2016. The results show that housing prices in Kaifeng increased significantly after the city’s integration with Zhengzhou in 2005. Further, the results confirm that the regional integration had a significantly positive effect on housing prices, especially in border areas. Moreover, the new time-saving cross-border light rail system had more influence on the prices of nearby housing than the new expressway, and new urban districts with high-quality amenities led to a sharp rise in housing prices in Kaifeng. Our findings offer policymakers some guidance concerning regional cooperation and urban development.

There is a growing recognition of the importance of the creation of new industrial specialisations for sustained regional growth. However, path dependency often limits a region’s ability to do so, as the occurrence of new industrial specialisations is conditioned by its existing industrial base. In this paper, we use data for 269 NUTS-2 EU regions to examine whether regional Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and Research and Development (R&D) enhance the capacity of regions to specialise in new industries, against the forces of path dependence. Our findings show that both KIBS and R&D exercise direct positive effects on the creation of new industry specialisations and that professional-KIBS and public R&D impact negatively on the relatedness of new specialisations, while private R&D does so positively.

This paper investigates how actors across spatial levels shape the directions of transition. We examine two Chinese provinces, Inner Mongolia and Jiangsu, with contrasting directionalities of solar photovoltaic (PV) development. The former developed PV as part of the large-scale centralized power system, and the latter focused on PV development as a core element of an alternative distributed form of power generation. We argue that three aspects have been key for understanding the divergent patterns: the specific portfolio of enacted institutional work; the type of interactions between niche and regime actors; and the selective leveraging of national institutional conditions by provincial actors.

Cohesion policy in general, and territorial cohesion policy in particular, are aimed at reducing regional imbalances. Polycentric urban development is widely considered a mechanism through which regional disparities would decrease, but the empirical substantiation of that assumption is still largely missing. This chapter explores whether countries that have a more balanced, polycentric urban system have less regional disparities than countries dominated by one or two larger metropolitan areas (hence, monocentric countries). With new, updated measurements of regional disparities and levels of mono-/polycentricity of European countries, we find contrasting findings to our previous study (2008) into this matter. Our evidence points towards polycentric countries being associated with less regional disparities. Also, for North and West Europe we find that countries that are more monocentric witnessed a sharper increase in regional disparities between 2005-2016 than their more polycentric neighbours. We conclude that polycentric urban development may indeed contribute to achieving a more cohesive Europe.

Research in economic geography has recently been challenged to adopt more institutional and multiscalar perspectives on industrial path development. This article contributes to this debate by integrating insights from (evolutionary) economic geography as well as transition and innovation studies into a conceptual framework of how path creation in emerging industries depends on the availability of both knowledge and legitimacy. Unlike the extant literature, we argue here that not only the former but also the latter may substantially depend on nonlocal sources. Conceptually, we distinguish between multiscalar export, attraction, and absorption of legitimacy. Coupled with conventional knowledge indicators, this approach enables us to reconstruct how not only external knowledge sourcing but also multiscalar institutional dynamics contribute to a region or country’s ability to leverage its potential for path creation in an emerging industry. Methodologically, we develop legitimation indicators from a global media database, which was built around the case of modular water technologies. Cross-comparing the evidence from six key countries (India, Israel, Singapore, South Africa, the UK, the US) with differing path creation constellations for this emerging industry, allows us to hypothesize how multiscalar legitimation influences a country’s prospects for creating a radically new industrial path.

How does the spatial context shape early innovation trajectories and how will this influence the directionality of transitions? We elaborate these questions for the case of transitions in personal mobility, focusing on emerging trajectories of electric vehicles and autonomous driving. We analyze how the dynamics depend on whether innovation and transition strategies are primarily geared towards urban or rural contexts. In order to identify potentially diverging trajectories, we specify socio-technical regime structures at two levels: the level of service regimes (i.e. rules that relate to specific means of transport, like the car) and the level of the sectoral regime (i.e. rules that regulate the interplay between the different service regimes). We will show that depending on whether the early innovation strategies are oriented at rural or urban contexts, quite different directionalities can result both regarding the technological trajectory of the new service option, but also regarding the overall sector configuration.

The ripple effect of housing price movements between cities has been extensively investigated, but there are relatively few studies on this topic within a metropolitan context, especially at the submarket level. This paper describes the use of ripple effect theory to examine the diffusion process and convergence of intra-urban housing prices at the submarket level in Shanghai, an emerging global city in China. The analysis is based on directed acyclic graphs, local indicators of spatial association time-paths, and a recently developed convergence test. The empirical results of grouping analysis identify 25 submarkets in Shanghai, and the diffusion of housing prices between these submarkets is found to be caused by both geographical and economic proximities. There is also a complex recursive process of price spillovers from high- to low-priced submarkets, and vice versa, which contributes to the spiraling local housing prices. Housing prices diverge across all submarkets, and the whole market can be divided into three convergence clubs. Finally, these convergence clubs have a circular structure with a degree of continuity. This study broadens our knowledge of the price interrelationship among housing submarkets at the intra-urban level. These findings have profound implications for urban planners, policy makers, and local residents.