Wuhan, the central city in the middle reach of the Yangtze River of China, is famous for its lake resources. However, the city's lake area decreased by 37.4% from 1991 to 2005. This study aims to analyze the relationships between lake area reduction and lakefront land use changes in Wuhan. In this paper, the connections between the spatial changes of lake areal extent and land use changes in the lakefront were established with mathematical models such as Moran's I and spatial analysis models such as transition matrix. Regarding the impacts of lakefront land use changes on lake area in the urban and suburban districts of Wuhan City, it can be concluded that: (1) the loss rate of lake area would be increased if the proportions of lakefront land use changes transformed into developed or agricultural land from other land use categories became higher; (2) the higher spatial autocorrelation of lakefront land use classifications (Moran's I > 0.25) could be an indicator for the loss rate of lake area in urban district of the city; and (3) the vector sum of lakefront land use changes was related to the displacement of lake center.

Although the homeownership rate rose from 65 percent in 1995 to 69 percent in 2005, this rise appears difficult to sustain. We argue that the development of new shared-equity mortgages (SEMs) that blur the lines between debt and equity would propel further advances in homeownership. The rationale for these mortgages is that the broad financial markets would value shares in individual housing returns more highly than hard-pressed prospective homeowners do.We describe a new class of SEMs and provide survey evidence that most households would prefer them to interest-only and other currently popular mortgages. Financial simulations confirm the value of the securitized SEMs to investors. We present computations suggesting that an increase in the overall U.S. homeownership rate of between 1% and 1.5% would likely result from the development of SEM markets.

The public housing system, operated since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, has provided Chinese city dwellers with low-cost accommodation. However, the rapid growth of the urban population, the lack of urban development planning, the bias in capital investment, and, especially, the structure of the public housing system itself have caused a severe housing crisis in Chinese urban areas. In recent years, leaders have addressed this problem with a complex series of reforms. These reforms generally move the system toward greater reliance on market forces, but numerous difficulties have emerged in creating housing markets within a centralized political and economic system.

Abstract:Urban system is a dynamic complicated system involved with many uncertainties, thus always leading to an undesired situation that the city doesn't develop as the previously made urban plans. Urban planning implementation evaluation, which is devoted to urban planning implementation supervision and management, is an important and indispensible part of efficient, healthy and sustainable urban development. The prevailing urban planning implementation evaluation methods have been widely applied and yielded some achievement, but the existence of uncertainty definitely brings about some defects and difficulties in tradition methods. In this paper, a multilevel fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model is proposed to handle with the uncertainty and complexity in urban planning implementation evaluation. First, a multilayer comprehensive evaluation index system was established, including both conformance-based criteria and performance-based criteria. Concerning the uncertainty in the process of obtaining the dynamic criteria values, a modified analysis hierarchy process was introduced to determine the weights of criteria, fuzzy set theory was adopted to calculate the membership degrees of criteria, and different fuzzy operators were chosen to obtain the final evaluation result layer by layer. Finally, a case study was analyzed to illustrate and test the proposed approach. It is concluded that the methodology integrating analysis hierarchy process with fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is capable of dealing with the situation where criteria are complex and involved with uncertainties when evaluating urban planning implementation.

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