The level of service-industry development has become an important symbol of the competitiveness and influence of cities. The study of the dynamic evolution characteristics and patterns of urban service-industry land use, the driving factors and their interactions is helpful to provide a basis for decision making in policy design and land use planning for the development of service economies. In this study we have conducted an empirical study of China, based on the methods of spatial cold- and hot-spot analysis, Tapio’s decoupling model, and GeoDetector. We found that: (1) the scales of land use, output efficiencies and development intensities of service-industries are increasing with a trend that takes the form of a “J”, “U” and “inverted U”, respectively; (2) Spatial variabilities and agglomerations are significant, with a stable spatial pattern of the scale of service-industry land use, and a gradient in the distribution of cold- and hot-spots. The dominant spatial units of output efficiency and development intensity have changed from low and lower to high and higher, and the cold- and hot-spots gather in clusters; (3) The development of service-industries is highly dependent on the input of land-resources, and only a few provinces are in a state of strong decoupling, while most are in a state of weak decoupling, with quite a few still in a state of expansive coupling, expansive negative decoupling, or even strong negative decoupling; (4) There are many driving factors for land use changes in the service-industry, with increasingly complicated and diversified relationships between each other, ranked in intensity as the scale effect > informatization > globalization > industrialization > urbanization.

The “Belt and Road” has developed from a Chinese initiative to an international consensus, and Silk Road cities are becoming a strategic step for its high-quality development. From the perspective of industrialization, the “Belt and Road” can be regarded as a “spillover” effect of the industrialization process in China. With the spatial shift of Chinese industries along the “Belt and Road” and their clustering in Silk Road cities, the development and change of industrial land in Silk Road cities has become a new area of concern for governments and scholars. In this paper, the driving mechanism of industrial land change in 129 cities along the Silk Road in China is empirically studied by the GeoDetector method. The findings include: first, the development and changes of industrial land in Silk Road cities are significantly spatially heterogeneous, and the “Belt and Road” reshapes the town system and economic geography along the route by virtue of the differentiated configuration and changes of industrial land, changing the social, political, landscape and spatial relations in cities on the line. Second, the driving forces of industrial land change in Silk Road cities under the influence of the “Belt and Road Initiative” are increasingly diversified and differentiated, with significant two-factor enhancement and non-linear enhancement interaction between two driving factors, and growing complexity of the driving mechanisms, requiring policy makers to design policies based on key factors, comprehensive factors and their interaction. Third, the environmental effect of industrial land change is highly complex. The industrial land quantity has a direct impact on the ecological state parameter and plays a decisive role in the quality of the ecological environment and its changes in Silk Road cities. However, changes in the industrial land affect the ecological state change indirectly, mainly interacting with it through the coupling of pollutant and carbon dioxide emissions, energy use, ecological planning and landscape design and policy interventions. Finally, this study provides a new framework and method for Silk Road scholars to analyze the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of land use and coverage in cities along the “Belt and Road” and their influence mechanisms, and provides a basis for the government to make decisions on industrial land supply and layout planning and spatial governance policy design, which is of great theoretical significance and practical value.

The stagnation of multinational and cross-regional goods circulation has created significant disruptions to manufacturing supply chains due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. To explore the impact of COVID-19 on the circulation of manufacturing industry products at different geographical scales, we drew upon a case study of development zones in the city of Weifang in China to analyze the characteristics of firms’ logistics networks in these development zones, and how these characteristics have changed since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data used in this study were collected from fieldwork conducted between 26 August 2020 and 15 October 2020, and included the supply originations of firms’ manufacturing sources and the sales destinations of their goods. We chose the two-mode network analysis method as our study methodology, which separates the logistics networks into supply networks and sales networks. The results show the following: First, the overall structure of firms’ logistics networks in Weifang’s development zones is characterized by localization. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the local network links have further strengthened, whereas the global links have seriously declined. Moreover, the average path length of both the supply and sales logistics networks has slightly decreased, indicating the increased connectivity of the logistics networks. Second, in terms of the network node centrality, the core nodes of the supply logistics networks are the development zones and the city in which the firms are located, whereas the core nodes of the sales logistics networks are the core companies in the development zones. However, since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the centrality of supply originations and sales destinations at the local scale has increased, whereas the centrality of supply originations and sales destinations at the global scale has decreased significantly. Third, the influencing factors of such changes include controlling personnel and goods circulation based on national boundaries and administrative boundaries, forcing the logistics networks in the development zones to shrink to the local scale. Moreover, there are differences in the scope of spatial contraction between supply logistics networks and the sales logistics networks.

COVID-19 has driven the formation of regional supply chains. In addition, cities became the basic units of intra-regional supply chain organization under urban administrative economies. Based on the data mining of the buyer-supplier relationship of listed manufacturing firms, this study explores the spatial characteristics of city supply networks within Shandong by the indexes of degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and a community detection algorithm using the social network analysis (SNA) method and ArcGIS software. It investigates the influencing factors of city supply networks by the correlation and regression of the quadratic assignment procedure (QAP). The results show the following: 1) Shandong has formed a multi-center city supply network with Jinan, Qingdao, Yantai-Weihai, and the distribution pattern of city centrality measured by different centrality indicators shows differences. 2) Cities belonging to the same network community show a coexistence of spatial proximity and “enclave” distribution. 3) Geographic proximity, convenient transportation links, administrative district economy, similarity of business environments represented by development zones, export-oriented or domestic market-oriented division of labor between cities, value chain division of labor between cities, and land price differences between cities promote the formation of regional city supply networks. Conversely, differences in local market size and wage levels between cities hinder the formation of city supply networks. This study attempts to apply the analysis results to regional planning from the perspective of regional industrial synergy development. Additionally, as it is based on typical Chinese provinces, it can provide policy references for national administrative regions and countries/regions at similar spatial scales for manufacturing supply chains, as well as for regional spatial layout decisions of manufacturing enterprises.