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Abstract:Land urbanization plays an important supporting and restriction role in the rapid and sustainable development of urbanization in China, and it shows distinctive spatial heterogeneity. Applying urban area as the basic research unit and urban construction land area as the core indicator, this paper establishes the conceptual framework and calculation method for the quantity and rate of land urbanization process. The study evaluates the spatial differentiation pattern of absolute and relative process of land urbanization in 658 cities in China from 2000 to 2010. The spatial distribution of cities with rapid land urbanization process is discussed, and the contribution rate and its spatial heterogeneity of major land use types are examined with the aid of GIS. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Land urbanization in China shows a clear spatial difference. The greater the city scale, the faster its land urbanization. The cities with rapid land urbanization show a significant pattern of central distribution in coastal regions and a scattered distribution in the inland regions. (2) Over the last 10 years, the average quantity of land urbanization in the 656 cities was 3.82 km 2 , the quantity of land urbanization is differentiated by administrative grade. The average rate of land urbanization was 6.89%, obviously faster than the speed of population urbanization. The rate of land urbanization reveals a pattern of differentiation between coastal and other cities. (3) In the past 10 years, the two primary land use types associated with land urbanization in China are residential and industrial, with a combined contribution rate of 52.49%. The greater the scale of the city, the more significant the driving effect of industrial land. In small-and medium-scale cities of the western and central regions, the growth of residential land is the primary driver of land urbanization, while in coastal urban agglomerations and cities on important communication axes, the growth of industrial land is the main driver. (4) Overall, urban population agglomeration, industrial growth and investment are the three drivers of land urbanization in China, but cities of different scales have different drivers.

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A new policy approach that seeks to formalize street vendors by immobilizing them in designated places has been taken as an alternative to exclusion in Guangzhou, China. This article develops an analytical framework for understanding this spatial formalization by drawing upon Foucault's concept of governmentality. Formalization can be understood as a form of spatial governmentality that seeks to guide the behaviour of informal economic individuals towards officially desired norms by creating bounded spaces. While the formalization programme reflects a moral form of political rationality that directs modern governments towards principles of social justice, it is fundamentally founded on a dispositional spatial rationality that imagines the dependence of social control on the ordering of space. However, this spatial rationality entails a tension between the goal of formalization and its practical effects, resulting in a failure to respect vital attributes of street vending and vendors’ counter‐responses to it. The article concludes by questioning the government's formalization approach, given its ignorance of the reality of informality, and opens up the question of what might be good formalization.

Abstract:With rapid urban development in China in the last two decades, the three-dimensional (3D) characteristic has been the main feature of urban morphology. However, the vast majority of researches of urban growth have focused on the planar area (two-dimensional (2D)) expansion. Few studies have been conducted from a 3D perspective. In this paper, the 3D urban expansion of the Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province, China from 2003 to 2012 was evaluated based on Geographical Information System (GIS) tools and high-resolution remote sensing images. Four indices, namely weighted average height of buildings, volume of buildings, 3D expansion intensity and 3D fractal dimension are used to quantify the 3D urban expansion. The weighted average height of buildings and the volume of buildings are used to illustrate the temporal change of the 3D urban morphology, while the other two indices are used to calculate the expansion intensity and the fractal dimension of the 3D urban morphology. The results show that the spatial distribution of the high-rise buildings in Yangzhou has significantly spread and the utilization of the 3D space of Yangzhou has become more efficient and intensive. The methods proposed in this paper laid a foundation for a wide range of study of 3D urban morphology changes.

BackgroundPeople living in neighbourhoods of lower socioeconomic status have been shown to have higher rates of obesity and a lower likelihood of meeting physical activity recommendations than their more affluent counterparts. This study examines the sociospatial distribution of access to facilities for moderate or vigorous intensity physical activity in Scotland and whether such access differs by the mode of transport available and by Urban Rural Classification.MethodsA database of all fixed physical activity facilities was obtained from the national agency for sport in Scotland. Facilities were categorised into light, moderate and vigorous intensity activity groupings before being mapped. Transport networks were created to assess the number of each type of facility accessible from the population weighted centroid of each small area in Scotland on foot, by bicycle, by car and by bus. Multilevel modelling was used to investigate the distribution of the number of accessible facilities by small area deprivation within urban, small town and rural areas separately, adjusting for population size and local authority.ResultsPrior to adjustment for Urban Rural Classification and local authority, the median number of accessible facilities for moderate or vigorous intensity activity increased with increasing deprivation from the most affluent or second most affluent quintile to the most deprived for all modes of transport. However, after adjustment, the modelling results suggest that those in more affluent areas have significantly higher access to moderate and vigorous intensity facilities by car than those living in more deprived areas.ConclusionsThe sociospatial distributions of access to facilities for both moderate intensity and vigorous intensity physical activity were similar. However, the results suggest that those living in the most affluent neighbourhoods have poorer access to facilities of either type that can be reached on foot, by bicycle or by bus than those living in less affluent areas. This poorer access from the most affluent areas appears to be reversed for those with access to a car.

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