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Urban parks, a core component of urban landscapes, play a crucial role in mitigating the negative effects of rapid urbanization and achieving sustainable urban development. In densely populated urban environments, providing urban parks fairly and efficiently, taking social preferences into account, is an important challenge. In this regard, we take Hangzhou, China, as an example and use a hedonic pricing model with a difference-in-differences estimator to test the effect of different types of urban parks on housing prices, quantify their respective economic values, and reflect homebuyers' preferences. The findings indicate that the construction of new urban parks leads to an overall increase in the value of the surrounding real estate to some extent. Specifically, the construction of comprehensive parks and large parks significantly enhances the value of nearby housing, while proximity to new medium-sized parks also results in a housing price premium, albeit to a lesser extent. In contrast, community parks and specialized parks have a less significant impact on housing prices. These findings provide valuable insights for equitable urban development and planning, optimizing the allocation of urban parks and determining investment priorities for different types of parks to enhance the sustainability of the urban environment and human well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Farmland transfer is a crucial aspect of modernizing China's agriculture, which has a significant impact on farmers' income distribution. With rapid urbanization, farmers' livelihood has changed significantly, and the income effects of farmland transfer will differ among heterogeneous farmers. Based on the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) data, this study examines the impact of farmland transfer on farmers' income growth and income disparity, as well as the income differences in farmland transfer among farmers with different types of livelihood capital. An endogenous switching regression model and unconditional quantile treatment effects are used to correct the selection bias and farmer heterogeneity. The results show that (1) farmland transfer increases farmers' income. Specifically, farmland transfer-in increases farmers' income by 21.15%, while transfer-out increases it by 43.33%. (2) The impact of farmland transfer on farmers' income has a "Matthew effect" and will widen the income gap between farmers. (3) Moreover, farmland transfer exhibits diverse income effects on heterogeneous farmers with livelihood capital. Capital-rich farmers experience the largest income-growth effect from farmland transfer-in, while capital-balanced farmers experience the largest income-growth effect from farmland transfer-out. The policy implications are to further improve the farmland transfer market and enable low-income farmers to participate by improving their qualifications and abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to effectively promote the large-scale and market-oriented farmland leasing process in China is one of the most important practical issues concerning the current academic circle and decision makers. However, restricted by the current situation of rural social development, farmers' spontaneous and informal farmland leasing is still widespread. Exploring the long-term evolution characteristics of informal farmland leasing at the village scale is of great significance for optimizing the process of farmland leasing, perfecting the farmland leasing market, and promoting moderate-scale farmland management. Therefore, based on field survey data from the whole village and social network analysis methods, this research conducted a detailed empirical study on the characteristics, development process, and consequences of informal farmland leasing behavior in a traditional rural society in central China. The results show that with the development of time, the scope of informal farmland leasing in Huang village has been expanding, of which more than 70% of the farmland in 2020 was leased among acquaintances. Farmland leasing among acquaintances is becoming a trend toward informal farmland leasing in some villages. At present, 13 large-scale households lease 73.9% of the total area of farmland leasing in Huang village. The informal farmland leasing in the village has basically formed a centralized circulation pattern with the villager group as the core, which can promote moderate-scale farming to a certain extent. However, there are also problems, such as the ability of a simple internal leasing mode to resist external risks is limited. The findings may be helpful in rethinking China's farmland leasing policy and provide useful insights into the multifaceted rural sustainability of other similar traditional villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic floor plan image analysis is becoming popular in the construction industry. An architectural floor plan provides the layout of a building floor and includes objects such as walls, doors, windows, and stairs. Detection of the walls in a floor plan image is important as the walls typically define the main layout of the floor and individual rooms. In existing literature, the walls are typically detected as a single class object. However, in construction type floor plans, the walls are represented by different drawings (e.g., solid-wall, dot-wall, diagonal-wall, hollow-wall, and gray-wall) based on the raw materials used for construction. Detection of multiclass walls would be desirable for applications such as materials cost estimation by builders and building information modeling. A convolutional neural network, namely WallNetv2, is proposed for semantic segmentation of multiclass walls in a floor plan image. WallNetv2 consists of an encoder, a channel contextual module, a spatial contextual module, and a decoder. The encoder extracts the hierarchical features from the input floor plan image. The channel and spatial contextual modules capture the relationship of the high-level features among channels and pixels, respectively. The decoder further processes the learned features and recovers the spatial information gradually with connections to the low-level features. The experimental results show that the proposed WallNetv2 achieves a mean IoU of 70%, which is superior to the state-of-the-art techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A land-use plan is a core policy tool to curb excessive non-agriculturalization of agricultural land. The effect of plan implementation can affect sustainable land use and regional development. Empirical studies have shown that land development commonly and frequently fails to conform to land-use plans. However, neither qualitative nor quantitative studies are conducted to comprehensively explore the reasons for zoning–land use mismatch. To help bridge this gap, this study explored to what extent a plan has been implemented and what factors have affected zoning–land use mismatch. A new deviation discriminant framework of planning implementation was presented. Moreover, the logistics model was applied to discuss which factors substantially affect the zoning–land use mismatch. The plan implementation results were divided into the conformed, exceeded and unused areas. The general land-use plan failed in its spatial control over rural settlements and other built-up lands, with both more than 90% of the newly added construction land beyond zoning. In addition, the newly added construction land of rural settlements, other built-up lands, and transportation lands all exceeded the quota control. Furthermore, the physical factors of distance from the river, the elevation, the slope and the level, and the social-economic factors of the gross domestic product, the fiscal revenue, the fixed assets investments, and the rank of town have prominent effects on zoning–land use mismatch. Enhancing the flexibility of the land-use plan and strengthening the relationship between planning quotas and spatial zoning in the future are necessary to promote the effect of plan implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]