Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies

China’s urban haze pollution has manifested prominent regional characteristics and spatial interaction, and such spatial interaction has evolved into a spatial network-based structural form. By use of the 2014–2016 real-time monitoring data of 160 Chinese cities, the authors precisely identify the forms of spatial correlation networks, reveal their overall features and microscopic models, and then construct spatial network weights to conduct empirical tests on the relationship between haze pollution and economic development. Studies show that spatial correlation networks featuring compactness, connectivity and superposition have already come into being in China’s urban haze pollution. Cities within the spatial correlation networks of haze pollution are interconnected in a triangle model. In different spatial correlation networks, the Environmental Kuznets Curve of urban haze pollution shows different states. The spatial network of socio-economic correlation, rather than entirely natural correlation, is more suitable for the current situation of haze pollution, which is a forceful retort to the opinions of Reductionism and Natural Determinism. The conclusions indicate that to address China’s haze pollution, it is advisable to keep exploring and improving the inter-regional prevention and control mechanism within the framework of economic cooperation, step up the top-level design and public participation of haze governance, and further consolidate the achievements of Blue Sky Protection Campaign.

In the face of the dual challenges of coordinated development of regional economy and sustainable development, strengthening the regional economic linkages is critical to realizing the coordinated development of the regional economy based on the reasonable transfer of carbon emissions. Under the background of industrial transfer, the authors used the inter-regional input–output model to measure the carbon emissions and labor transfers among 30 provinces in 2002, 2007 and 2010, analyzed the relationship between labor mobility and the spatial transfer of carbon emissions and introduced their scales and directions into a gravity model to measure the economic relations among regions. The results show that the embodied carbon emission tends to transfer from western and northeastern China to central and eastern China, which is consistent with the direction of labor mobility, and both of them show the feature of spatial clustering. Under the effects of carbon emission transfers and labor mobility, the radiation effects of the central node provinces in China such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, Hebei, Beijing, Henan and Gansu have given rise to the integrated regional spatial organizations of Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, Yangtze River Delta Pan-Pearl River Delta and northwestern China, among which Yangtze River Delta and Pan-Pearl River Delta enjoy a relatively stable structure.

The conflicts in spatial planning are the main reason that restricts the sustainable development of land use in China, and it is also the main barrier to the building of “Territorial Spatial Planning System”. This study analyzes the conflicts between urban planning and land-use planning from the three dimensions of construction land, basic farmland and ecological land based on a land-use transition matrix with the central urban area of Liupanshui City, Guizhou Province as a case region, and analyzes the causes of spatial planning conflicts from the perspectives of the central and local governments in terms of their preferences and interactive relationships. The main conclusions of this paper are as follows. (1) Urban planning and land-use planning have comprehensive conflicts with each other in terms of the construction land, basic farmland and ecological land, i.e. the scale of construction land in urban planning is 154% of that in land-use planning, and the scale of basic farmland in urban planning is 88.56% of that in land-use planning. (2) Central and local governments are the two main stakeholders of spatial planning, and they have different preferences for the utilization of spatial resources at prefecture-level cities. The central government is concerned about food security, and therefore, pays more attention to the protection of cultivated land, while the local governments focus on economic benefits and the ecological environment, and therefore, pay more attention to construction and ecological lands. (3) The urban planning system is a bottom-up design system, which determines that urban planning mainly reflects the preferences of local governments, while the land-use planning system is a top-down design system, which determines that land-use planning mainly reflects the central government’s preferences. The policy implication of this study is that in order to manage spatial planning conflicts, it is necessary to manage the conflicts of interest among stakeholders.

In the era of agricultural civilization, the city size and layout adapted to nature and natural productivity; while in the era of industrial civilization, the constraints of natural productivity were broken by technological means, and the increasing returns to scale have enabled the urban population size to exceed 10 million and the urban population density to exceed 10,000 people/km². Under the paradigm of industrial civilization, the spatial agglomeration of resources is driven by economic rationality. Besides, China’s urban hierarchy has become a barrier and further strengthened the polarization trend of city size, resulting in an urban system in which the cities at higher administrative levels concentrate a lot of resources while suffering from prominent urban diseases, small- and medium-sized cities lack development vitality, and urban and rural areas are separated from each other. The historical experience that the flow of resource factors between urban and rural areas facilitates a relatively balanced spatial distribution of quality resources is worth learning. Under the paradigm of ecological civilization, it is important to harmonize humans with nature in the transformation and reconstruction by pursuing nature-based solutions, and build a low-carbon, resilient, and coordinated urban system.

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, the Chinese economy has rapidly developed along with large-scale movement of population. For cities, migrant population means not only the changes in population and manpower, but also the influence on the whole economic system. On the basis of national censuses and 1% national population sample surveys, and in combination with the monitoring data of nationwide migrant population and urban economic and social statistics, the author explored the influences that migrant population has brought to urban economic development. The research suggests that migrant population will produce continuous and positive effects on the future development of urban labor market, transformation of economic structure, and improvement of economic efficiency in the medium-to-long term. Migrant population will not only supply cities for manpower and contribute to economic growth, but also drive economic efficiency improvement and the transformation of economic development mode. The future urban prosperity largely depends on how people understand and treat migrant population at present.

This paper, using literature analysis, explores the development of low-carbon pilot cities in China and its research progress, including the enrichment of the connotations of low carbon and low-carbon city, the progress in building China’s low-carbon cities, the relevant research by Chinese and foreign scholars and its trends. The result shows that for the construction of low-carbon cities in China, domestic and foreign scholars have conducted in-depth research on the connotations of low-carbon economy and low-carbon city, low-carbon index, carbon discharges peak value, technological approaches, energy utilization, low-carbon society, policy instruments and evaluating system, but the research is still subject to several limitations. For example, judging from the evaluation system of low-carbon cities, the research assigned small weights to the non-technical indexes such as low-carbon policies, governance mechanism and performance appraisal system. Judging from the spatial scale of case studies, the studies on the relatively developed cities in eastern China outnumber those on the cities in western China, especially in the minority areas. In terms of the factors influencing the construction of low-carbon cities, inadequate attention has been paid to the related psychological factors, in particular those of ethnic minorities.