BackgroundThe residential care system is rapidly developing and plays an increasingly important role in care for the elderly in Beijing. A noticeable disparity in the accessibility to existing residential care facilities, however, is demonstrated in existing studies. The spatial optimization of residential care facility (RCF) locations is urgently needed to promote equal access to residential care resources among the elderly population.MethodsA two-step floating catchment area method with an additional distance-decay function is adopted to measure accessibility to residential care facilities. The spatial optimization model is developed to maximize equity in accessibility by minimizing the total square difference between the accessibility score of each demand location and the weighted average accessibility score. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method is implemented for the solution.ResultsThe optimized RCF layouts improve equal spatial access to residential care resources with very low accessibility standard variation (0.0066). A relatively large number of beds (51% of the total beds) to be located in the suburban districts between the central and periphery districts of Beijing are optimized. A smaller number of beds to be located in the central and periphery districts (33% and 16% respectively) are optimized. The gaps between the existing and optimized layouts suggest that more RCF beds (5961 beds) are needed in suburban districts, while the RCF beds in some subdistricts located in the central and periphery districts are oversupplied (5253 and 1584 surplus beds respectively).ConclusionsThe optimized results correspond to the municipal special plan proposed by the Beijing government. The optimization objective of this study is different from traditional facility location optimization models, and the method is efficient in maximizing equal access to residential care facilities. This method can support knowledge-based policy-making and planning of residential care facilities.
Cities separated in space are connected together by spatial interaction (SI) between them. But the studies focusing on the SI are relatively few in China mainly because of the scarcity of data. This paper deals with the SI in terms of rail passenger flows, which is an important aspect of the network structure of urban agglomeration. By using a data set consisting of rail O-D (origin-destination) passenger flows among nearly 200 cities, inter-city rail distance O-D matrixes, and some other indices, it is found that the attenuating tendency of rail passenger is obvious. And by the analysis on dominant flows and spatial structure of flows, we find that passenger flows have a trend of polarizing to hubs while the linkages between hubs upgrade. However, the gravity model reveals an overall picture of convergence process over time which is not in our expectation of integration process in the framework of globalization and economic integration. Some driven factors for the re-organization process of the structure of urban agglomeration, such as technique advance, globalization, etc. are discussed further based on the results we obtained.
In recent years, great economic output of land has been achieved in economic-technological development areas in China, but the intensity of land use in some of these areas is very low. The degree of the low intensity of land use needs to be evaluated. The current method of comprehensive evaluation and grading by one index system has the limitations due to the existence of differences between regions and industries. This paper evaluates industrial land use intensity by Total Factor Productivity (TFP) analysis, which not only measures the intensity but also illustrates the efficiency of input factors. This method is applied to the Beijing Economic-technological Development Area (BDA). A comparison analysis on factor use efficiency and input structure of capital and labor between industries is also carried out in the absence of a labor-income ratio.
While tourism eco-efficiency has been analyzed actively within tourism research, there is an extant dearth of research on the spatial network structure of provincial-scale tourism eco-efficiency. The Super-SBM was used to evaluate the tourism eco-efficiency of 30 provinces (excluding Tibet, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan). Then, social network analysis was employed to examine the evolution characteristics regarding the spatial network structure of tourism eco-efficiency. The main results are show as follows. Firstly, tourism eco-efficiency of more than two thirds’ provinces witnessed an increasing trend. Secondly, the spatial network structure of tourism efficiency was still loose and unstable during the sample period. Thirdly, there existed the multidimensional nested and fused spatial factions and condensed subsets in the spatial network structure of tourism eco-efficiency. However, there was still a lack of low-carbon tourism cooperation among second or third sub-groups. These conclusions can provide references for policymakers who expect to reduce carbon emissions from the tourism industry and to achieve sustainable tourism development.
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