In 2006, China lunched its first Digital City initiative to build a national geo-spatial framework. Over the past ten years, 511 county-cities benefited from the national initiative with funding and technical resources channeled from the central government. Has the initiative achieved its goals? How has the geo-spatial framework affected local governmental administration, public services, business operation, and the daily life of citizens? What lessons can be learned from the ten-year experience of digital city development? Answering these questions is of important policy, scholarly, and practical interest. The Digital City initiative set the foundation for building smart cities that China’s central government agencies and many local municipalities are currently pursuing. A review in retrospect of China’s digital city development helps inform future Smart City investment decisions and related policy making in the nation. Lessons learned from the Chinese experience are also valuable to cities in other countries.

As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, it is vital for planners and policy-makers to understand the patterns of urban expansion and the underlying driving forces. This study examines the spatiotemporal patterns of urban expansion in the Texas Triangle megaregion and explores the drivers behind the expansion. The study used data from multiple sources, including land cover and imperviousness data from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2001–2016, transportation data from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), and ancillary socio-demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We conducted spatial cluster analysis and mixed-effect regression analysis. The results show that: (1) urban expansion in the Texas Triangle between 2001 and 2016 showed a decreasing trend, and 95% of the newly urbanized land was in metropolitan areas, especially at the periphery of the central cities; (2) urban expansion in non-metropolitan areas displayed a scattered pattern, comparing to the clustered form in metro areas; (3) the expansion process in the Texas Triangle exhibited a pattern of increased development compactness and intensity; and (4) population and economic growth played a definitive role in driving the urban expansion in the Texas Triangle while highway density also mattered. These results suggest a megaregion-wide emerging trend deviating from the sprawling development course known in Texas’ urban growth history. The changing trend can be attributed to the pro-sustainability initiatives taken by several anchor cities and metropolitan planning agencies in the Texas Triangle.

There have been growing concerns around the world over the rising spatial inequality (SI) amid fast and vast globalization. This paper presents an effort to benchmark the conditions and trends of spatial inequality in 37 megaregions in the United States, Europe, and China. Furthermore, the study selected three megaregion examples and analyzed the effect of developing high-speed rail (HSR) as an infrastructure investment strategy on reshaping the spatial pattern of job accessibility. The study measures spatial inequality with the Theil index of gross regional product and with the rank-size coefficient of polycentricity. Results show that spatial inequality exists and varies in magnitude within and between megaregions. On average, Chinese megaregions exhibited the level of spatial inequality about two times or more of those in the U.S. and European megaregions. The decade between 2006 and 2016 saw a decrease in the Theil index measure of megaregional inequality in China, but a slight increase in the United States and Europe. Fast growing megaregions exhibit high levels and rising trends of spatial inequality regardless of the country or continent setting. HSR helps improve mobility and accessibility; yet the extent to which HSR reduces spatial inequality is context dependent. This study presents a first attempt to assess and compare the spatial inequality conditions and trajectories in world megaregions aiming at promoting international learning.

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There has been long and ongoing interest in the impacts of high-speed rail (HSR) on regional spatial development. Most existing studies, however, reported findings at relatively coarse geographic scales, i.e., at the prefecture-city or above level in the Chinese context. This paper presents the empirical evidence of HSR impacts from the county-level cities in China’s Mid-Yangtze River City-Cluster Region (MYRCCR). The study utilized rail time data and the socio-economic data for MYRCCR’s 185 county-level cities in the years of 2006 (without HSR) and 2014 (with HSR) and analyzed the impacts of HSR on inter-city travel times, accessibility, spatial inequality, and regional economic linkages among the MYRCCR cities. The results show that, from 2006 to 2014, HSR reduced city-to-city average travel time by 34.5% or 124 min and improved accessibility to all cities in the MYRCCR. HSR’s impacts on accessibility and spatial equality exhibited a scale-differentiated pattern. MYRCCR-wide, HSR transformed a pattern of spatial polarization towards the one of corridorization. Cities located on major HSR corridors became more balanced in 2014 than in 2006. Nevertheless, at the county-city level, the gap between cities with the most and the least accessibility gains was much greater than the gap between those with the largest and the smallest travel time savings. Attributable to HSR services, the intensity of economic linkage increased between MYRCCR cities, especially between the provincial capital cities and those on the major lines of the national HSR grid, which implies an emerging process towards territorial cohesion in MYRCCR. National, provincial, and local governments should consider transportation as well as non-transportation policies and measures to direct HSR impacts towards further enhanced spatial development and regional equality.