This study takes an actor-oriented perspective and focuses on the role of urban planners in the production of gated communities in China. It probes their related values and the structural factors influencing their preferences and planning choices. The main empirical basis is a large-scale survey of urban planners throughout China. The results show for example that most of the surveyed planners are residents of gated communities themselves. This is highly important, because their residential experiences and middle-class identities are likely to affect their values and professional perspectives. Their attitudes towards gating furthermore strongly correlate with the views of the local governments for whom they work, which is understandable in view of the prevailing power structures. It is found that most planners either support gated communities or do not see much leverage to act against them, but that many are able to achieve amendments to reduce negative effects of gating.

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Barcelona has a long history of public space renewal in neighborhoods. In recent years, there has been a planning innovation which named superblocks planning. The plan aims to revive the block streets and advocates the return of the streets back to the pedestrians. This paper introduces the background of Barcelona's superblocks planning, and explores the innovative conception of the superblocks planning, following with the discussion of the differences of conception among superblocks, traditional blocks and gated communities. It also elaborates the contents and implementation mechanism of the superblocks planning in Barcelona. The purpose of this paper is to provide useful inspiration for the promotion of residential blocks and the planning of blocks in China.

Considerable scholarly attention has been directed to the adverse health effects caused by residential segregation. We aimed to visualize the state-of-the-art residential segregation and health research to provide a reference for follow-up studies. Employing the CiteSpace software, we uncovered popular themes, research hotspots, and frontiers based on an analysis of 1211 English-language publications, including articles and reviews retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database from 1998 to 2022. The results revealed: (1) The Social Science & Medicine journal has published the most studies. Roland J. Thorpe, Thomas A. LaVeist, Darrell J. Gaskin, David R. Williams, and others are the leading scholars in residential segregation and health research. The University of Michigan, Columbia University, Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and the University of North Carolina play the most important role in current research. The U.S. is the main publishing country with significant academic influence. (2) Structural racism, COVID-19, mortality, multilevel modelling, and environmental justice are the top five topic clusters. (3) The research frontier of residential segregation and health has significantly shifted from focusing on community, poverty, infant mortality, and social class to residential environmental exposure, structural racism, and health care. We recommend strengthening comparative research on the health-related effects of residential segregation on minority groups in different socio-economic and cultural contexts.

The increased ageing of the population is a vital and upcoming challenge for China. Walking is one of the easiest and most common forms of exercise for older people, and promoting walking among older people is important for reducing medical stress. Streetscape green visibility and the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) are perceptible architectural elements, both of which promote walking behaviour. Methodologically we used Baidu Street View images and extracted NDVI from streetscape green visibility and remote sensing to scrutinize the nonlinear effects of streetscape green visibility and NDVI on older people’s walking behaviour. The study adopted a random forest machine learning model. The findings indicate that the impact of streetscape green visibility on elderly walking is superior to NDVI, while both have a favourable influence on senior walking propensity within a particular range but a negative effect on elderly walking inside that range. Overall the built environment had a non-linear effect on the propensity to walk of older people. Therefore, this study allows the calculation of optimal thresholds for the physical environment, which can be used by governments and planners to formulate policies and select appropriate environmental thresholds as indicators to update or build a community walking environment that meets the needs of local older people, depending on their own economic situation.