This book examines the strategies adopted by local governments to obtain excess construction land quotas in the face of the central government's strict land management system. It applies game theory, principal-agent theory, collective action theory, and competition and collusion theory to analyze the trade-offs and constraints faced by local governments under the existing institutional framework. It also empirically tests the imitative competitive strategy of land violation and the institutional collusion strategy of land development rights trading using spatial panel model and Tobit...

This book addresses the analysis of self-containment of employment (SCE), which measures journey-to-work trips among the percentage of workers who work locally. High SCE encourages the use of non-motorized transport and reduces transport-related energy consumption. In this book, mobile phone location data is employed to assess journey-to-work trips and explore spatial variations in SCE at multiple geographic scales. It finds that SCE is significantly higher in the suburbs than that in the central urban areas and tends to decrease as the spatial analysis unit shifts from the macro to the...

“Resilience vs Pandemics: Innovations in Public Places and Buildings” explores innovative solutions for architecture and public places during and after the pandemic. Additionally, the authors contribute to the documentation of architectural and social transformations that have been prompted by previous transmissible diseases, as this knowledge can inform responses to future pandemics. In this volume, the chapters present critical, exploratory, multi- and interdisciplinary, and cutting-edge research approaches; with a particular focus on the effects of COVID-19 and other...

This book reviews all important aspects of wastewater treatment with the aim of shedding new light on these effects through a combined understanding of traditional and new paradigms. The book is divided into five sections, the first of which reinterprets wastewater types from the point of generation, examining the characteristics and different physicochemical properties of wastewater. The second section discusses recent advances in understanding process water from surface water to groundwater. A wide range of issues in an affected area polluted by heavy chemicals and metals used in...

This book applies multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches to facilitate sustainable consumption and production. Sustainable consumption and production not only focuses on the economic prosperity but also pays great attention to environmental protection and social justice, in order to promote sustainable development. In such context, most ‘material’ can be deemed as ‘hazardous’ at any stage of their lifecycle, i.e., from extraction to final disposal, because of its quantity, concentration, or physical, chemical, or infectious characteristics, may cause, or pose a...

This book aims to formulate recommendations for achieving a healthy neighborhood living environment for the middle-income people in China‘s suburbs. In China, the expeditious urbanization triggers the prosperous commodity housing development, which further grows with the spatial restructuring and socioeconomic transition. Residential suburbanization is generated, accompanied with the emergence of new-middle class and the change of lifestyle. However, the health effects of suburbanization in China are overlooked. This book investigates the health performance of suburban residents and the...

Taking the Chinese context seriously, this book provides critical reflections and policy-informed accounts of how and why old industrial cities generate uneven resilience in the face of crisis. It offers unconventional conceptualizations and on-the-ground empirical studies in the Chinese context when it comes to the literature on regional economic resilience. Theoretically, this book adopts multiple perspectives, including evolutionary, complex adaptive systems, and institutional and geographical political economy, to provide a more systematic understanding of regional economic resilience...

This open access book is a multi-disciplinary effort to address the complex socio-economic issues and the substantial environmental pressure that the expected large-scale migration will exert on cities in the near future. Emerging from a joint research project between China and the Netherlands, the authors herein put forward a vision for cities that the future demands while assessing efforts, recent and ongoing, in this direction. Building on the lessons learned from this research, it also proposes strategies and best practices for future policy aimed at the design and development of...

AI Agency in Climate Emergency is a daring and topical examination of how AI is evolving from a stand-alone solution to a crucial, integrated force in the fight against climate change. In a time of increasing inequality, dwindling forests, failing infrastructure, and rising oceans, it repositions AI as a new type of agent inside ecological, political, and social systems. The book's 20 chapters and six themes cover energy decarbonization, foresight, agriculture, ecological monitoring, green finance, carbon markets, civic involvement, and behavioural change. Its...

This book discusses the evaluation of urban lifestyle, urban livability and human settlement environment from the perspective of interdisciplinarity. On this basis, it explores the living spaces and new forms of living spaces of different groups, and expands the scope of traditional urban living space research, especially highlighting the impact of the development of new technologies and the emergence of new living concepts on urban living space. This book concludes with a summary and an outlook for future research. Combining quantitative and qualitative research, and taking into account...