A comparative study on the quality of China's eco-city: Suzhou vs Kitakyushu

Li, Yan; Qiu, Limin

doi:10.1016/j.habitatint.2015.08.005

Cited by 26 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 20 publications

(14 reference statements)

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“…One can argue if developing countries in the Global South manage to successfully implement green growth policies, the world can enjoy a much more sustainable future. To date, however, the effectiveness of the existing green growth practices in these developing countries has not been properly assessed (Li and Qiu, 2015). Hence, the lessons offered by Kitakyushu can be taken into account when policies are formed and progress is measured in the course of pursuing a green economy.…”

Section: ) A)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The trilemma of sustainable industrial growth: evidence from a piloting OECD’s Green city

Vuong

Nguyen

2019

Palgrave Commun

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Can green growth policies help protect the environment while keeping the industry growing and infrastructure expanding? The City of Kitakyushu, Japan has actively implemented eco-friendly policies since 1967 and recently inspired the pursuit of sustainable development around the world, especially in the Global South region. However, empirical studies on the effects of green growth policies are still lacking. This study explores the relationship between road infrastructure development and average industrial firm size with air pollution in the city through the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Non-linear Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) methods were applied on nearly 50-years' time series data, from 1967 to 2015. The results show that the shape of the EKC of industrial growth, measured by average firm size, depends on the type of air pollution: inverted N-shaped relationships with NO 2 and CO, and the U-shaped relationships with falling dust particle and O x. Regarding infrastructure development, on the one hand, our analysis shows a positive effect of road construction on alleviating the amount of falling dust and CO concentration. On the other hand, the emissions of NO 2 and O x are shown to rise when plotted against road construction. The decline of CO emission, when plotted against both industrial growth and road development, indicates that the ruthlessness of the local government in pursuing green growth policies has been effective in this case. However, the story is not straightforward when it comes to other air pollutants, which hints at the limits of the current policies. The case of Kitakyushu illustrates the complex dynamics of the interaction among policy, industry, infrastructure, and air pollution. It can serve as an important reference point for other cities in the Global South when policies are formed, and progress is measured in the pursuit of a green economy. Finally, as an OECD SDGs pilot city and the leading Asian green-growth city, policymakers in Kitakyushu city are recommended to revise the data policy to enhance the findability and interoperability of data, as well as to invest in the application of big data.

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Section: ) A)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The trilemma of sustainable industrial growth: evidence from a piloting OECD’s Green city

Vuong

Nguyen

2019

Palgrave Commun

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“…Being allowed to use these recognized sustainable city labels encourages local governments to engage in positive action, but also serve as a useful marketing instrument for the attraction of investors, companies, talented residents, and visitors that can add significantly to both local revenue and nominal GDP growth. Hundreds of such submissions have been endorsed, making the Chinese appearance in sustainable urban development a truly impressive one from a cross-national comparative perspective [47][48][49][50][51][52][53]. In fact, the attractiveness of these labels in the midst of a reality of severe pollution and health risk is such that there are definite advantages even for municipalities whose proposals were not approved still to make use of these labels.…”

Section: From Eco-civilization To City Brandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Eco-Civilization to City Branding: A Neo-Marxist Perspective of Sustainable Urbanization in China

Jong

2019

Sustainability

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While the national discourse on ‘eco-civilization’ drives conceptual thinking on sustainable urban development in China, in practice a systematic implementation gap appears to exist when it comes to local implementation. This paper examines how the leakage occurring in the trajectory from central government ideas to municipal and district level construction projects can be explained. More specifically, it aims to spot whether it is merely the result of mismatches resulting from ineffective interactions among players in the policy process, institutional misalignment between policy goals and policy instruments, or even if the mobilization of bias in the policy process is systematic enough to justify a neo-Marxist explanation of the abovementioned implementation gap. I found two main sources of structural bias: capital accumulation in the mechanisms for urban development and power accumulation in the mechanisms underlying the administrative process.

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“…Suzhou is a prefecture-level city in the core area of the Yangtze River Delta region, connecting Shanghai to the east. With a history of more than 2500 years, Suzhou shows some differences from other documented Chinese cities in its development trajectory towards modernization and urbanization, whose economic restructuring is heavily driven by globalization and the influx of FDI [37,38], and it has been transformed from a famous national commercial city in history to an industrial base of Shanghai [39], as well as one of the best eco-cities globally [40]. Meanwhile, rural areas in Suzhou have also undergone a long history of diversified and complex patterns of evolution [41], which has been unprecedentedly shaped by factors such as significant rural-to-urban migration [42,43], the legacy of a strong township and village enterprises (TVEs)-based industrialization, and domestic mass tourism development [44,45].…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Emerging Location-Based Service Data on Perceiving and Measuring Multifunctionality of Rural Space: A Study of Suzhou, China

Yuan

Zhang

et al. 2019

Sustainability

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Understanding how human mobilities reconstruct contemporary rural space is of great significance to multifunctional rural transition. However, conventional approaches adopted by social surveys have a technological restriction on collecting data of individual behavior, such as limited samples, subjective self-reported data, and time-consuming investigation. This study proposes a data-driven methodology to explore multifunctionality of rural space by employing the real-time Tencent user quantity (RTUQ) data to analyze the quantity and distribution of observables in rural space. Based on over 250,000 records of hourly RTUQ data during a one-week research period, we perceive spatiotemporal variation of human mobilities in three differentiated villages in Suzhou, China, as well as measure function of residence, employment and consumption on holidays, weekdays and weekends using original equations of function index. Results show that the RTUQ data is valid and reliable for perceiving dynamic patterns of human mobilities at village level, as well as offering new implication for transitional pathways of decision-making. The proposed method is proved to be suitable for distinguishing and comparing multifunctionality of rural space in various times and places, future research on exploring contemporary rural space towards multifunctionality with more geospatial big data is put forward.

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A comparative study on the quality of China's eco-city: Suzhou vs Kitakyushu

Cited by 26 publications

References 20 publications

The trilemma of sustainable industrial growth: evidence from a piloting OECD’s Green city

The trilemma of sustainable industrial growth: evidence from a piloting OECD’s Green city

From Eco-Civilization to City Branding: A Neo-Marxist Perspective of Sustainable Urbanization in China

Emerging Location-Based Service Data on Perceiving and Measuring Multifunctionality of Rural Space: A Study of Suzhou, China

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