Rapid urbanization has led to a massive transformation of urban space in China, spatially and socially.Its higher education has been growing much faster than ever before, along with an explosive increase of university students' population. Different from the Western universities, a majority of Chinese university students are required to reside in gated campuses. Their accessibilities to public transport and subsequent spatial and social implications have been neglected in the literature. Taking Wuhan city as a case study, this paper aims to examine the public transport service to gated university campuses and its impacts on spatial and social inequalities. The spatial accessibility is measured by four methods: proximity-based, gravity-based, population-weighted average, and competition-based, using population data at residential building level. All the results have confirmed the presence of spatial and social inequalities in public transport accessibility for university campuses and students population.The study has also found that these inequalities are not contributed directly from the provision of public transport services but the closure of gated campus to the external public transport.
Abstract:Since the 20th century, urbanization has been the main characteristic of global land development. If we can reveal and understand the characteristics and underlying mechanisms of urban development, we can then identify a sustainable development pattern for cities. In this paper, we primarily focus on the determinants of two main types of land use in urban development, industrial and commercial, in an empirical study of Beijing. We use a spatial data analysis method to seek and model major determinants of industrial and commercial land growth in the period of 2000-2010 in Beijing. A spatial logistic regression model is used to explore the impact of spatial independent variables on these two types of land use. The study shows that: (1) newly-added industrial land during 2000-2010 received significant contributions from the number of local enterprises engaged in services in 2010, the use of land for agriculture and construction in the neighborhood in 2000 and planning orders; (2) factors contributing to land transferred for commercial use included the number of enterprises, construction land in the neighborhood and accessibility improvement.
Urban ecosystem health evaluation can assist in sustainable ecological management at a regional level. This study examined urban agglomeration ecosystem health in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River with entropy weight and extension theories. The model overcomes information omissions and subjectivity problems in the evaluation process of urban ecosystem health. Results showed that human capital and education, economic development level as well as urban infrastructure have a significant effect on the health states of urban agglomerations. The health status of the urban agglomeration's ecosystem was not optimistic in 2013. The majority of the cities were unhealthy or verging on unhealthy, accounting for 64.52% of the total number of cities in the urban agglomeration. The regional differences of the 31 cities' ecosystem health are significant. The cause originated from an imbalance in economic development and the policy guidance of city development. It is necessary to speed up the integration process to promote coordinated regional development. The present study will aid us in understanding and advancing the health situation of the urban ecosystem in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and will provide an efficient urban ecosystem health evaluation method that can be used in other areas.
An increasing number of nature reserves are being invaded by various development and construction activities, such as energy, resources, and transportation facilities. The ecological footprint model, which enables a quantitative assessment of ecological sustainability, can assess whether human consumption at various spatial scales falls within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. Based on the traditional ecological footprint evaluation model: the Global Agro-Ecological Zone (EF-GAEZ model), this study proposes an improved ecological footprint model based on net primary productivity (EF-NPP model) and its validations. In this study, the status of ecological footprints and the ecological carrying capacities of 319 national nature reserves in 2010 is explored, and the changes in ecological surpluses and ecological deficits from 2000 to 2010 are analyzed. The ecological footprint per capita and the ecological carrying capacity per capita calculated by the two models were mostly consistently at the same level (more than 68%), which indicated that the ecological footprint per capita and the ecological carrying capacity per capita of the two models followed the same rule. The EF-NPP model can reflect the change in the global climate, the degradation of the soil, and the progress of the technology.Sustainability 2019, 11, 2 2 of 16 of nature reserves have been developed for tourism, planting, or breeding industries, and local communities have continuously eroded the land of nature reserves [9][10][11]. This pressure greatly exceeds the ecological carrying capacity, which is an ecological concept that assumes that a limited number of individuals can be supported at a given level of consumption wherein the environment is not degraded [12], causing great damage to the main targets of protection and the resources and environment in these areas [13].One way to estimate human demand compared to an ecosystem's carrying capacity is "ecological footprint" accounting [14][15][16]. The ecological footprint is an accounting system of indicators based on the context that the Earth has a finite amount of biological production that supports all life on it [17]. Accounting for the ecological footprint is a non-monetized ecosystem assessment tool and a significant international biophysical method for distinguishing the level of development in recent years [18][19][20]. Bioproductive space has been used as a synonym for the renewable capacity of the Earth's ecosystem to measure the flow of energy into and out of the socioeconomic system, thereby characterizing the interdependence and supportive relation between human society and nature [21]. The ecological footprint could be used to express the space equivalents-individuals or countries occupying bioproductive areas [22]. The idea of this concept is to compare the area needed to support a certain lifestyle with the available area, thus providing a tool to assess whether the consumption is ecologically sustainable [23].The ecological footprint model can assess whether human consumpt...
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