Journal of Urban Planning and Development

With the operational advancement of e-commerce, the need for retail stores and facilities in commercial cores is somewhat challenged. The shift toward virtual shopping limits the need for physical and purpose-oriented trips to prime shopping locations. Such spaces are being replaced by warehousing, retail outlets, or other types of storage facilities away from downtown locations. While a growing consensus exists to support this spatial transformation, not much has been done in terms of an academic inquiry and a critical analysis of the nature and impact of the shift from physicality to virtuality. This paper theoretically investigates the impacts of transition on spatial organization by analyzing contemporary city structures and key determinants while studying the expanding operational breadth of e-commerce and its resulting impacts. The paper also develops a framework for understanding the current and potential consequences of e-commerce on contemporary intellectual constructs of land use and sheds light on the transition. The framework will cause urban planners and policy makers to (re-)think current planning approach(es) and investment opportunities in the future or transitional cities.

Although a successfully built environment has been widely accepted in urban planning as a method of promoting urban vitality in China, the related theories were proposed in Western cities, and these have not been empirically verified in Chinese cities, especially in high-density urban areas. The availability of mobile phone location data has made it possible to accurately measure urban vitality and explore the influence mechanism of built environments in China’s high-density urban areas. In this study, the intensity of urban activity was used as a proxy for urban vitality and its value was calculated during six time periods of the day using active mobile phone location data in the central urban area of Shanghai, China. Subsequently, the variables were confirmed within the built environment according to classical theories, and values were assigned to these indicators based on topographic and survey maps. Furthermore, after a series of tests, six spatial econometric models were created to evaluate the impact of the built environment on urban vitality. The results demonstrated that active mobile phone location data can reflect and help measure urban vitality to a great extent. Mixed use and diversity, scale, old buildings, density, and border vacuums all contributed to the urban vitality of Chinese high-density urban areas; meanwhile, density and proximity to public facilities were the most significant. In addition, compared to working time, urban vitality was more susceptible to the built environment during nonworking times.

Although numerous planning and design guidelines have been developed to guide landscape implementation in urban areas, there is scant information on how they are validated before their application. Validation, defined in this study as the process of assessing the applicability and readiness for adoption of guidelines, is seldom reported but is essential if landscapes are to meet the diverse needs of stakeholders. This study focused on the validation of design guidelines for neighborhood landscapes by using a transdisciplinary process to integrate the opinions of the researchers who develop the guidelines, the policy makers who adopt the guidelines as landscape policies, the design practitioners who use the guidelines in design, and the residents who use the neighborhood landscapes once they are implemented. Three design schemes were developed based on the guidelines, and six surveys were conducted to understand the opinions of the four stakeholder groups. The transdisciplinarity of the validation process was assessed using three criteria: credibility, legitimacy, and saliency. The study found that (1) these three criteria can be used to assess the outcomes of the validation process, although each criterion was met to different degrees; (2) the overall assessment of the design schemes produced by following the design guidelines was favorable, but residents and policy makers placed different emphases on the assessment areas; (3) the perceived importance of particular ecosystem services in design schemes, such as heat and flood hazard mitigation, was relatively high, but maintenance of soil quality was less visible and less emphasized; and (4) all groups perceived particular ecosystem services, such as recreation and mosquito control, as highly applicable to neighborhood landscapes, while the importance of noise reduction, soil improvement, and stormwater treatment functions was more variable across the groups. The study yields insights that could be used to validate other guidelines.

Rapid urbanization and irrational land use seriously threaten ecological security. Quantitative analysis optimization of ecological security patterns (ESPs) could ensure the sustainable development of ecosystems. Identifying of ecological sources’ thresholds and corridors is a difficult task. An integrated framework and analytical method are proposed here based on Geographic Information System (GIS) software, Python language, and a minimum cumulative resistance (MCR) model to construct and quantitatively analyze ESPs. The model includes the following functions: (1) the delimitation of ecological patches by assessing regional habitat quality; (2) identification of ecological sources using patch numbers (PNs), proportional area, and a landscape connectivity index; (3) identification of a resistance surface coefficient with a night light index; and (4) extraction of key ecological corridors and nodes using a modified multiprocess and batch processing flow of MCR. Habitat quality was classed at middle and high levels, the minimum area threshold of ecological sources was $2\mathrm{k}{\mathrm{m}}^2$, and urban areas and highways were the main obstacles to sustainable development. Potential key ecological corridors were extracted. The method can provide technical support for regional infrastructure planning, landscape optimization, and regional development.

This study is an assessment of residential satisfaction with nondwelling components in segregated urban Jos, Nigeria. Data from 318 household heads collected through self-administered questionnaires were analyzed using descriptive statistics, factor analysis, and hierarchical regression analysis. The results showed that residents were generally not satisfied with their residential environment, but at varying degrees among the parameters that were employed for the assessment. satisfaction was higher with neighborhood social relationships and ethnoreligious homogeny than neighborhood density and access to strategic areas and social infrastructure. They were least satisfied with security and crime. The regression model that was estimated for the study explained 93% to determine residential satisfaction with nine predictor attributes. The very high beta coefficient of the model suggests that residential satisfaction of the inhabitants of segregated urban environments can be enhanced through improvement in the five parameters and more strongly on security and crime, access to strategic areas and infrastructure, and neighborhood density. The insignificance of all the sociodemographic attributes in the model implied that residential satisfaction of violence-induced segregated urban dwellers can be improved irrespective of age, gender, ethnic group, religion, education level, income, marital status, household size, housing tenure, and duration of stay in the neighborhood environment.

This paper explores the fringe-belt phenomenon in Foshan, which, unlike the large majority of historical cities in China, lacked city walls throughout its history. By tracing the stages in the transformation of the physical form of the city, a contribution is made to understanding the process of urban development and regeneration. The implications for other Chinese cities that have undergone rapid industrial growth since 1949 were considered.

The term inefficient land refers to developed or built-up land that has little worth, below expected worth, or unsatisfactory utilization. It is necessary to identify the spatial pattern of inefficient land. Remote-sensing interpretation (RSI) and land-use evaluation (LUE) are mature methods used to achieve this goal, but the socioeconomic information they provide is hard to read and unintuitive. Using urban district of Zhanjiang, China, as a case, this study uses a double-aspect method (DAM), a comprehensive evaluation method, to identify the spatial patterns of inefficient land in an inner-city location. Results show that inefficient land accounted for 9.44% of the built-up land in the study area. In these areas, socioeconomic requirements were not met due to the irrational utilization of land. Land with a better location, higher worth, and fewer costs and limitations was preferred for redevelopment. The DAM was found to be more useful than RSI and LUE. Its use could help scientifically determine which urban land should be redeveloped in built-up areas similar to the urban district of Zhanjiang in international communities.

As many cities face traffic congestion, pollution, and urban sprawl, transit villages with transit-oriented development (TOD) and higher ridership have been a core theme for academics and professionals. Evaluating access to metro transit villages with higher transit demand is critical to assess how TOD and changed transit demand affect neighborhoods. Few studies have measured spatial access to metro transit villages by combining street configuration and metro ridership to identify its effects on property prices. This study used five newly developed accessibility and centrality measures to simultaneously capture street configuration and metro ridership within a neighborhood. The empirical models confirmed the effects of accessibility and centrality to metro transit villages on housing prices considering multiple walkable neighborhood scales. The models revealed that accessibility and centrality to metro transit villages with higher ridership were capitalized in higher housing prices within a 2-km network radius. However, prices of houses that were too close to metro stations obtained weaker premiums due to negative externalities such as crowdedness, congestion, and noise. Residents value housing in walkable neighborhoods with dense, interconnected streets directly routed to metro stations, and transit-oriented communities with higher metro ridership.

Urban agglomerations are important regional units for China to participate in global competition. They are also the sites at which contradictions between China’s resource utilization, environmental pollution, and economic development are most apparent. This case study uses the hybrid directional distance function method to develop a comprehensive measure to evaluate resource, environmental, and economic efficiency. The results reveal spatial-temporal change characteristics and evolution rules relating to resource, environmental, and economic efficiency in China’s urban agglomerations in 2005 and 2013. The study shows relatively low levels of these three types of efficiency in China’s urban agglomerations. A gradually decreasing trend for all three types of efficiency is evident moving from the eastern to the central and western regions. Differences in resource and economic efficiency among different urban agglomerations have an increasing trend, whereas differences in environmental efficiency among agglomerations have a decreasing trend. All three types of efficiency demonstrate phased evolution features adapted to the developmental phases of urban agglomerations.