The relationship between human and nature is a central topic of geography, and a major problem in the development of human society. In the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping clearly put forward the important thesis of ‘Human and Natural Life Community’. How to implement the public policy discourse into the concrete action practice depends on scholars’ empirical analysis on typical cases. The previous studies on the relationship between human and nature usually take individual or family as the analysis unit, discussing the interaction between the individual or family and the specific type of natural object. Relatively little works have been done dissecting how the relationship between human and nature in specific regions are constructed. Taking Xiawu Village in Tibet as a case study, field investigations were carried out for villagers and government workers based on qualitative methods such as semi-structured interviews and participatory observation. This paper examines the relationship between local society and nature, and analyzes how to construct the community of life for human and nature from the perspective of daily life practice. The findings are as follows: 1) When Tibetan villagers interact with highland barley (Hordeum vulgare var. coeleste) and cattle, they connect with the latter through multiple life practice strategies, such as material, emotion, space and identity transformation. Through the practice of man’s naturalization, a representational community of life for human and nature is constructed. At this time, highland barley and cattle, as instrumental nature, are the physical representation of the villagers, narrating the daily life when human actors are absent. 2) When Tibetan villagers interact with Cordyceps and Macaca, they conn-ect with the latter by means of life practice strategies such as meaning, system, and space negotiation. Through the practice of humanization of nature, a linked community of life for human and nature is constructed. At this time, Cordyceps and Macaques, as objectified nature, were constructed by society, given social life, and gradually embedded in human’s daily life.
Exploring vegetation cover changes in alpine regions and their influencing factors has become one of the focal issues for scholars at home and abroad. Based on MODIS-NDVI data and meteorological data, this study analyzed the spatial and temporal characteristics of vegetation NDVI in the Southwest Tibetan Plateau (SWTP) from 2000 to 2020 and the effects of climate change and human activities on vegetation NDVI by using trend analysis, correlation analysis and residual analysis. The results showed that NDVI in the SWTP has been increasing in the past 20 years. There are obvious differences in the growth rates of vegetation NDVI in different time periods mainly as follows: autumn > growing season > summer > whole year > spring > winter; although there are differences in the distribution pattern of vegetation NDVI in different time periods, the vegetation cover in the eastern part of the plateau is significantly higher than that in the western part. The vegetation status is basically stable in most areas of the plateau, with significant local improvement and degradation in some areas. On the interannual scale, the increase of temperature and precipitation led to the increase of vegetation NDVI, and on the seasonal scale, the increase of temperature in spring, autumn and winter led to the increase of vegetation NDVI, and the increase of precipitation leads to the decrease of vegetation NDVI, and the increase of temperature in summer and growing season led to the decrease of vegetation NDVI, and the increase of precipitation leads to the increase of vegetation NDVI. Human activities have a positive impact on most areas of the plateau, and a negative impact in some areas, concentrated in counties with semi-agricultural and semi-pastoralism and purely pastoralism.
Based on the combining forecasts, production function and the author’s previous work, this article evaluated the future grain supply and demand balance of Tibet at the county scale after considering the impact of climate change. The results show that: 1) The areas with high grain production in Tibet will be concentrated in the Yarlung Zangbo River, Nyangqu River and Lhasa River Region and other river valley areas. The areas with high grain demand will be mainly in counties and cities with larger populations. Increasing meat consumption in the future will consume more feed grain. 2) The grain supply and demand balance in Tibet will have obvious geographic differences between the north and the south. It will be relatively satisfying in the south, but will be relatively terrible in the north. 3) At current status, the gain self-sufficiency ratio of Tibet is 70.58%, failing to achieve an overall balance between grain supply and demand, and it will be 62.59% and 53.55% in 2030 and 2050. Although the total grain demand cannot be completely met in the future, it can still guarantee staple grain self-sufficiency. 4) Climate change will have a positive impact on the grain self-sufficiency. It is estimated that in 2030 and 2050, climate change will increase the self-sufficiency ratio by 2.45% and 2.09% in Tibet. This study can help clarify future food security status and develop the agricultural layout in Tibet, thus ensuring food security in this border area and promoting sustainable development of the plateau agriculture.
A new ‘parietal art’ composed of 5 handprints and 5 footprints on travertine deposit has been found during the second scientific expedition of Tibetan plateau in Chusang Village, Lhasa City, Tibet Autonomous Region. Anatomical measurement, 3D model simulation, Uranium dating and morphology analysis has been conducted on this ‘parietal art’. The results indicate that: 1) The ‘parietal art’ was created deliberately on the soft travertine before it fossilized; 2) The fossil travertine with ‘parietal art ’ was dated to between around 169 000 and 226 000 B.P.） based on uranium series dating, which includes a direct dating age of a fingerprint on the surface (188 000 to 207 000 B.P.); 3) This discovery is one of the earliest records of hominin activities on the Tibetan plateau, and it also provides new evidence for hominin to adapt to low temperature and hypoxia environment; 4) This ‘parietal art’ is the world’s earliest rock art and the handprints on it are also the earliest handprints left by hominin. 5) This “parietal art “demonstrate that the ‘unknown type of hominin’ has cognitive and spatial perception capabilities. In addition, the discovery of this rock art will also have the potential to rewrite the history of human art and to deepen our understanding of the cognition level of ancient hominin that have already disappeared.
Kashin-Beck disease (KBD) is one of the key endemic diseases in China’s Health Poverty Alleviation Project. This study attempts to assess the healthy life loss caused by KBD in Aba County, Sichuan Province by using the metric of years lived with disability (YLD). The age-sex specific YLDs and YLD rate among KBD grades were measured, respectively. The spatial and temporal agglomeration characteristics at the township scale and the influencing mechanism of YLDs and YLD rate were analyzed by the methods of spatial autocorrelation, trend fitting and geo-detector. The results showed that the total healthy life loss from KBD in Aba County was estimated at 1783.58 YLDs (31.25 YLD per 1000 population). YLD rates for elderly group and females were relatively high. Among different KBD grades, KBD of grade II contributed most to the total YLDs (40.8%). There was no consistent trend between the prevalence rate and the YLD rate of KBD. The YLD rate in Aba County showed a spatial agglomeration characteristic, with low values in the north and high values in the south. The soil type was the most important environmental influencing factor, accounting for 78.7% of the spatial variation of the YLD rate. The land use type was the most influential social factor, which accounted for 62.0% of its spatial variation. The interactions between climate and terrain, soil, as well as population quality and population structure presented nonlinear enhancement, significantly increasing the explanatory power of single factors. The YLDs showed a steady decline trend over time and concentrated in the 1960s and 1970s. The spatial and temporal agglomeration of the healthy life loss from KBD were collectively affected by natural, social and policy factors. The natural factors played a dominant role in space, while the social environment mainly played roles in time.
This study takes the Great Wall platform as an example to explore the pattern, process and mechanism of the global network construction of Chinese media. Viewing cities as the spatial locations of network construction and international television media as linkages, this article takes 49 cities as the research object, i.e., 19 Chinese cities including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan and 30 GaWC world cities, integrating the analytical methods of linkage strength, city media influence index, and heterogeneity of media propagation direction, in order to achieve geographical spatial visualization of the two-way media construction process, including the outward process of Chinese international TV programs export to the world and the inward process of the import of TV programs from the world cities to the Chinese regions of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Based on the two-way interactive process of TV media, this work further explores the mechanism of the global network construction of the Great Wall platform. The results show that: 1) The media source of the Great Wall platform in China presents an overall geospatial pattern of one core (Beijing), three regions (Yangtze Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao and Chengdu-Chongqing) and multiple nodes (Taiyuan, Changsha, Nanning and Taipei); 2) The outward network of the Great Wall platform reflects the media network linkage between major Chinese cities and GaWC world cities, with a stepwise diffusion network formed by Beijing and Hong Kong with the GaWC Alpha-level world cities of New York, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok as well as with the GaWC Beta-level world cities of Hanoi, Nairobi, etc.; 3) Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as the main important nodes of the foreign media inward network mainly form spatial linkages with North America, Southeast Asia and Western Europe, with predominant linkages from global multinational media groups in the USA as well as creative media of Singapore, UK, France and Germany. Actors involved in the global network construction by the Great Wall platform include not only state actors such as the National Radio and Television Administration and China Television International Media, Ltd., but also non-state actors such as overseas private television stations and Chinese entrepreneurs. As to the function of the main actors, the National Radio and Television Administration is responsible for formulating policies on the accessibility, quantity and content regulations, approving and supervising the Great Wall platform, while China Television International Media, Ltd. is responsible for operating the Great Wall platform. Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan directly receive overseas satellite TV channels. The main contribution of this work lies in exploring the global-national-local multi-scaler media spatial interactions based on the Great Wall platform as a national media outreach platform, emphasizing the reshaping of global media networks by the Great Wall platform, investigating the positive role of Chinese media going-out in shaping the country’s image, and thus providing references for related academic research and policy formulation.
Based on long time series train schedule data, this paper analyzes the spatial and temporal characteristics of railway passenger network accessibility and daily railway flow in Chengdu-Chongqing Twin-City Economic Circle, use social network analysis to study the railway passenger network. The results show that: 1) The development of railway passenger transport network in Chengdu-Chongqing Twin-City Economic Circle has experienced three stages: the division of the twin cities, the construction of corridors and the improvement of network. The accessibility shows a dumbbell spatial pattern of convergence along the corridors. 2) The organization mode of railway passenger transport in economic circle has changed from dual nuclear proliferation to corridor agglomeration and diffusion; 3) The scope of binuclear condensed subgroups keeps expanding, and the integration level of railway passenger transport network in economic circle is greatly improved.
This study firstly compares and analyzes the changes in terms of the spatial and temporal patterns of crimes in Changchun between 2008 and 2018. A Bayesian spatio-temporal model integrating the fixed effects, the spatial random effects and the temporal random effects is built and fitted using the R-INLA package in R program. Combining with the maps of different effects of the model which are made used the software of ArcGIS 10.5, we identify the areas with higher relative risks of crime different from the general level or trend and further analyze the process and spatio-temporal patterns of crimes in Changchun. The study shows that the total amount of crimes displayed an obvious decreasing trend and the numbers of police precincts with higher crimes declined apparently. The crime rates showed an obvious increasing trend in the peripheral areas of the city while it went down dramatically in the inner city during the two years. The results of the Bayesian spatio-temporal model shows that the average trend of relative risk of crimes shows a significant increase in spite of the lower basic average relative risk of crimes. The police precincts with higher spatial effects were predominantly concentrated in the core area of the inner city. Especially, the highest spatial effects were mostly located in the precincts with those major traditional commercial area or the intensive economic activities. The higher differential time effects were mainly located in the peripheral areas. Particularly, those precincts where the three major national development zones located possess the higher relative risks represented by the differential time effects. After integrating the spatial and differential time effects, several higher relative risks regions are identified through both spatial and temporal effects within the inner city, deserving more attentions in the work of crime control and countermeasures in the future. Bayesian method show obvious advantages on data integration, area-specific heterogeneity identification and degree of flexibility and can provide more insights into the formation and evolution of the crime pattern.
Based on the main grain-producing areas and the non-main grain-producing areas as the control, the spatial econometric model was adopted to evaluate the impact of grain production increase on the agricultural ecological environment in the main and non-main grain-producing areas, in an attempt to answer the question ‘whether the increase in grain production has exacerbated the deterioration of agricultural ecology’. The results showed that: 1) There was a significant spatial correlation between grain yield and agro-ecological pollution, and the spatial correlation of the two variables was heterogeneous in time, which meant that the spatial homogeneity hypothesis was no longer applicable, and the traditional research on the impact of grain yield increase on the ecological environment may have limitations; 2) The increase in grain production did not exacerbate the deterioration of agricultural ecology. The establishment of the main grain-producing areas is to guarantee the food security, which not only reverses the trend of ‘non-grain-producing’ to some extent, but also weakens the pollution to the agricultural ecological environment. 3) The reason why the increase in grain production did not exacerbate the deterioration of agricultural ecology is that the scale effect caused by the increase in the proportion of grain production scale and a series of effective policy measures reduced the intensity of chemical fertilizer application in the main grain-producing areas, and the impact of agricultural mechanization input on the agricultural ecological environment has a certain threshold effect. The above conclusions mean that there is no irreconcilable contradiction between food security and ecological protection, which makes the realization of ‘green development’ and ‘two mountains theory’ possible. In the future, the potential of agricultural mechanization to restrain the deterioration of agricultural ecology should be stimulated in the process of moderate scale agricultural management. Considering the influence of space effect, the linkage mechanism of agricultural environment governance in adjacent areas should be established.
Based on the spatial data of tourist destinations in Guizhou, the analysis methods including mean nearest-neighbor distance, geodetector method, etc. are adopted to research the spatial distribution characteristics of tourist destinations in four time sections of Guizhou from 1990 to 2018, and analyze the evolution process of key tourist destinations in these periods. It also discusses the relationship between the spatial distribution of tourism destination and the geographical environment, social and economic factors, and further carries out the driving force analysis. The results show that: 1) In the four periods, tourist destinations are distributed in a condensed state, showing the transition from point-clump aggregation to planar and zonal aggregation. 2) The evolution process of tourism revenue is more sensitive and intense than that of total tourist flow in the whole province. Both of them are dominated by longitude variation, and present the trend that the proportion of the west is larger than that of the east. 3) The vertical distribution of tourist destinations in the whole province is approximately normal; The tourist resources in carbonate rocks are mostly natural attractions, while where in clastic rocks is mainly the aggregate distribution of ethnic minority attractions; The number of tourist destinations distributed in the 5 km buffer zone of the fault line is about 90%, and its spatial distribution is basically consistent with the strike of the fault line; The Triassic, Cambrian and Permian strata are the main distribution areas of tourist destinations; The tourist destinations are obviously distributed along the provincial road. 4) The distribution of tourist destinations in the whole province is mainly driven by seven factors including the distance from tourist destinations to river valleys, the distance from county-level administrative centers, the straight-line distance of expressways, the density of land transportation network, the density of expressway network, the distance from fault lines, and the density of river valleys; The combination of the factors that the distance from river valleys, the distance from county-level administrative centers, the straight-line distance from expressways, and the density level of transportation network, controls centrally the overall pattern of spatial distribution of tourism destinations in Guizhou.
Whether the supply of pension resources matches the degree of aging is related to the allocation efficiency of pension resource and the welfare level of the elderly enjoying the related services equally. In the new era, the elderly in China have undergone profound changes in lifestyle, quality of life and life philosophy. Based on the needs of aging in the new era, rational allocation of old-age resources is of great significance for implementing the national strategy of actively responding to aging and promoting the high-quality development of the cause of aging. Using kernel density estimation, coupled coordination model and spatial Durbin model, this study discusses the evolution pattern of aging, the allocation of pension resources and the adaptation degree between the allocation of pension resources and aging in China. The study also reveals the influencing factors of the spatial adaptation between the allocation of pension resources and China’s aging. The results show that: 1) The degree of aging in China is increasing, and it presents the spatial characteristics of “high in the east and low in the west”. 2) In China, the overall level of pension resources allocation has been improved, and the degree of spatial dispersion has increased. The absolute difference between provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) has expanded with the passage of time. 3) The spatial adaptation between pension resources and aging has improved significantly, but the spatial heterogeneity is prominent, showing a declining development pattern from the eastern coast to the central and western regions as a whole; the agglomeration degree of spatial adaptation changes from strong to weak and then to strong. On the whole, the spatial agglomeration degree is constantly improving, but with the migration of time, it has a polarization trend. 4) The spatial adaptation between pension resources and aging has a significant positive spatial spillover effect. Among the influencing factors, pension investment and policy attention can promote the spatial adaptation of pension resources and population aging in this region; the elderly association reduces the spatial adaptability of the allocation of pension resources in neighboring provinces through spillover effect; the dependency ratio of old-age volunteers and the elderly can not only effectively promote the spatial adaptation of pension resources and aging in this province, but also improve the spatial adaptation of pension resources in neighboring provinces; the role of old-age institutions in spatial adaptation of pension resources is not obvious.
With the recent spread of emerging ‘urban diseases’ and the uncertainty of major public events, resilient cities are becoming a priority for urban development. Considering the regional integration in the Yangtze River Delta as national strategy, the article uses entropy-comprehensive index method to calculate the elastic construction level of 41 cities in the region from 2003 to 2018. Besides, a spatial analysis method was used to investigate the spatial distribution characteristics. Our findings show that: 1) The comprehensive elasticity index of all cities in the study area is on the rise, and the gap between cities is narrowing. A high-level elastic city pattern has been formed along the Yangtze River, around the Hangzhou Bay and in the southern Zhejiang Province. However, most of the peripheral areas of the Yangtze River Delta, such as northern Anhui Province and the northern Jiangsu Province, are still at a low elasticity level. 2) The elasticity indexes of all cities have obvious spatial clustering characteristics. ‘High-High’ clustering appears in Shanghai and its surrounding cities, ‘Low-Low’ clustering appears in northern Anhui Province and northern Jiangsu Province, and ‘Low-High’ clustering appears in Huzhou, Xuancheng and other cities. 3) The distribution of engineering, social and economic elasticity characteristics are relatively consistent, which are relatively high in the municipality directly under the central government, provincial capital and economically strong city. However, the level of urban ecological resilience in the study area is generally low. The results suggest that urban engineering, social and economic resilience construction in the Yangtze River Delta region should pay attention to narrowing the regional gap in the future, the regions with better natural background should strengthen the maintenance of ecological environment, and the economically developed regions should improve the level of ecological environment governance.
Tourism development is an important path to guide the transformation of rural functions and realize rural revitalization. Taking Xixinan Village, a traditional village in Huangshan City, as an example, the study applied in-depth interviews with government employees, exterior tourism companies, exterior homestay investors, local residents, and tourists to explore the process and evolution mechanism of rural functions from a micro perspective. It was found that the rural function evolution of Xixinan Village has gone through three stages: 1) The budding stage of tourism (2003-2008). The theme development project of ‘Jinpingmei Cultural Park’ was implemented in Xixinan Village, but the benefits and impact of tourism development were not obvious. There was no substantial evolution of rural functions. 2) In the tourism exploration stage (2009-2014), exterior investors purchased and repaired the ancient houses in Xixinan Village. Then they were opened to the tourists. It gave full play to the diversified functions of living, production and consumption of ancient dwellings, and showed the cultural and aesthetic values of Hui-style architecture. Furthermore, the tourism development strategy of Xiesheng Tourism Development Company in Xixinan Ancient Village has failed. 3) In the tourism development stage (2015-), the team of Professor Yu Kongjian from Peking University fully undertook the tourism development and management of the ancient village of Xixinan Village. The rural business has been continuously enriched. Xixinan Village has gradually realized the simplification of agricultural production functions and living functions to cultural protection and inheritance, ecological conservation, leisure and tourism, research and education, and other multi-functional shifts. In general, Xixinan Village has a clear development plan, a rich rural tourism industry, and an increasingly prominent rural multi-functional value system. The functional evolution of Xixinan Village is the certain result of the co-existence of multi-stakeholders such as local government, exterior tourism companies, exterior homestay investors, local residents and tourists. Government policy guidance is the basic guarantee to promote internal and external factor flow and rural multifunctional transformation. Exterior tourism companies are the leading force in promoting the development and operation of Xixinan Village tourism and carrying out various forms of cultural and creative activities. Exterior homestay investors are the key forerunners in constructing rural homestay space, constructing ecological space and leading the practice of local culture civilization. Local residents are vital practitioners who use their own resources to fill market segments and realize home-employment coordination. The cooperation and symbiosis among various stakeholders promote the development and evolution of the rural functions of Xixinan Village. From the perspective of rural function evolution, this study reveals the logic behind the return of villagers, capital and citizens to the countryside to build villages in Xixinan Village, and provides a realistic template and case reference for the transformation and development of Huizhou traditional villages.
With the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy, ‘utopian’ rural villages are gradually being engulfed by power and capital. How to ensure the fairness and justice of different subjects in all aspects is particularly important. This article takes Shiwu Newly Village in Guangzhou as a case site, acquires materials through in-depth interviews, participatory observations and collection of text materials, uses grounded theory to conduct coding analysis, and explores the dimensions and processes of the game and negotiation of the main body of rural space justice in the context of tourism development. The research found that: 1) The content of the main game and negotiation of rural space justice mainly includes the four dimensions of distribution justice, housing justice, border justice and faith justice. The core and focus of the four dimensions is power justice. 2) The four dimensions are intertwined and influence each other. The first two dimensions echo some of Marx’s ideas on space justice, and the latter two dimensions are the oretical innovations in the Chinese context. 3) In the process of rural transformation and development, the various demands of the government, enterprises, and villagers have been mixed, which has led to the performance of diverse, complex and dynamic spatial justice games and negotiation processes by different subjects. This research is conducive to constructing a theory of spatial justice that conforms to the Chinese context and explaining Chinese phenomena; In practice, it provides a reference governance paradigm for the settlement of tourism-driven rural spatial justice.
Park green space, which is important green infrastructure in the city, can provide opportunities for physical exercise, social communication, nature exposure and emergency hedge. Spatially fine-grained evaluation of accessibility to park green space has been limited by data availability. This study fills the research gap by using mobile SDK positioning data in Shenzhen. It uses this data to obtain population distribution; it uses the improved Gaussian two-step floating catchment area method to calculate park green space accessibility of neighborhood scale; it uses open source map API to calculate the travel time of different transportation modes. The accessibility indicators are analyzed by different housing groups: Urban villages, affordable housing and commodity housing. The results show first a social disparity in the accessibility of park green space in Shenzhen. The accessibility of urban villages is good and balanced. Public rental housing and economic and comfortable housing have poor accessibility to neighborhood parks, while the former has high accessibility to urban parks and the latter to natural parks. In addition, the accessibility of talent worker housing is the lowest. Talent housing has high accessibility to neighborhood parks, but poor accessibility to urban parks and natural parks, resulting in low overall accessibility. Third, Transportation mode has great influence on the accessibility to green space. Accessibility by driving among housing groups is nominal, but transit accessibility among them shows significant variation. Based on these findings, our study makes the following suggestions, including 1) improving the presence of neighborhood parks around public rental housing and economic and comfortable housing. 2) prioritizing transit service improvement for low-income residential areas, and 3) changing the planning requirement for green space supply in land development. Our study enriches existing literature by helping readers to understand park green space accessibility from the perspective of social equity in Chinese cities and by establishing a better connection to planning practice with spatially fine-grained data and evaluation indicators.
This article adopts the research methods of on-the-spot investigation, information collection, surveying and mapping data, document sorting, etc., taking the main palace restored in the imperial city of Hue in Vietnam Nguyen Dynasty as an example. From the perspectives of cultural geography and design to extract and identify the spatial pattern, decorative themes, color configuration, it reveals its internal relationship and influence mechanism with Chinese Lingnan inlaid porcelain decoration. The results show that the inlaid porcelain in the imperial city of Hue is integrated into the local culture in the architectural decoration of Lingnan, and the reason why the Vietnamese official inlaid porcelain style is formed is the collaborative efforts of similar natural geographical environment, the interregional radiation of Chinese architectural ceramics and the favor of the ruling class of the Nguyen Dynasty, the cultural representation of the inlaid porcelain decoration is a combination of ingeniousness, beauty and complexity, showing the imperial power space characteristics of the patriarchal rites and the will of the country, and has become a model of the architectural landscape of the royal palaces in Southeast Asia. This article provides a reference for promoting the construction of the "Belt and Road" Initiative and activating the cultural heritage of exchanges and mutual learning between Chinese and foreign civilizations.
Land use change has always been an important content of global change research. An in-depth understanding of the temporal and spatial characteristics of land use change can not only provide a direct decision-making basis for the optimal allocation of land resources, but also provide important data support for regulating ecosystem management and improving human social well-being. However, previous studies on land use change lack the analysis of the spatio-temporal coupling process. Taking Gansu Province as an example, based on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform to achieve land change monitoring in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020, and uses Bayesian hierarchical spatio?temporal model (BHM) to analyze the characteristics of temporal and spatial changes of land use degree. The results show that: 1) During the study period, the land use degree of Gansu Province showed an increasing trend, among which the growth rate was obvious from 1995 to 2000 and 2010 to 2015; 2) The spatial pattern of land use degree is “high in the east and low in the west”, hot spots mainly distributed in Longzhong, Longdong and Longnan regions; 3) The local changes of land use degree show obvious regional differences, and the overall performance is “weak in the east and strong in the west”. The hot spots of local changes are mainly distributed in the Hexi region; 4) The main factors affecting changes of land use degree are economic scale and industrial structure, among which economic factors have the highest degree of influence.
Land use change is closely related to urban thermal environment. This paper uses remote sensing image data to interpret and invert the land use types and land surface temperature (LST) of Xi’an in 2000, 2008 and 2016 respectively, and analyzes land use changes from scale, structure, and pattern. Meanwhile, the characteristics of thermal environment changes in Xi′an are explained. On this basis, the relationship between land use changes and thermal environment changes is systematically analyzed to reveal the impact of land use changes on the urban thermal environment. The results are as follows: 1) From 2000 to 2016, with the increase of construction land, the average LST of Xi’an City showed a rising trend. The proportion of cultivated land and construction land was positively correlated with the change of land surface temperature, while the proportion of forest and grass land and water area was negatively correlated with the change of land surface temperature. 2) The larger the patch dominance degree, the more complex the shape and the higher the aggregation degree of forest, grass and water, the more conducive to improving the thermal environment, while the larger the patch dominance degree and the higher the aggregation degree of farmland and construction land, the higher the LST and the thermal environment deterioration. 3) The large patch forest grassland and water area with high degree of agglomeration and connectivity have a more prominent cooling effect, on the contrary, the impervious water surface formed by the construction land with high concentration has a stronger warming effect. This study can provide reference for improving urban thermal environment from the perspective of land use.
Numerous studies have explored the effects of built environments on individual body mass index (BMI). However, fewer studies have considered the comprehensive effects of different scales of the pedestrian environment (including walkability and other built environment factors related to walking) and other mediating factors. How does the pedestrian environment affect individual obesity? Does the pedestrian environment at different geographic scales have a different impact on obesity? To address these issues, this paper constructs structural equation models (SEMs) based on 1 470 questionnaire data of 18 neighborhoods in Guangzhou in 2019 to explore the effects of the pedestrian environment on residents being obese at three geographic scales (i.e., neighborhood, 1 000 m buffer of neighborhood boundary, and sub-district). The study found that residents’ travel attitudes and preferences will affect commuting behavior, but they have no significant direct impact on obesity. After controlling residents’ socio-economic attributes and their travel attitudes and preferences, the pedestrian environment around the residences has a significant negative total effect on residents’ BMI. Part of this total effect is from direct effect, while part is from indirect effect through affecting mediating factors like commute mode, commute distance, and daily walking. The impact of the pedestrian environment on residents’ BMI has a scale effect, and the impact of walkability at the neighborhood scale is the most significant, which has both a direct effect and an indirect effect. In contrast, the walkability at the sub-district scale has no significant effect on residents’ BMI. This indicates that to build a healthy community and improve residents’ health, land use planning and transport policies should pay more attention to the walking range closely related to residents’ daily activities, that is, the 15-minute living circle. Other built environments related to walking, such as different scales of greenness, road network density, metro station density, and distance to the city center, have varying degrees of impact on residents’ BMI. Specifically, increasing the greenness exposure in residential areas, such as building new neighborhood parks, adding green spaces in front of and behind the building and green spaces by the street-side to improve the level of environmental greening, increasing road network density and street connectivity, are conducive to encouraging residents to walk more and use non-motorized modes and public transport to commute, thereby reducing the risk of obesity in residents. Compared with buses, increasing the coverage of the metro network is more useful to promote public transport travel and has a positive effect on reducing the risk of obesity.
