Collective-owned industrial land is the primary focus for addressing inefficient land use in the Pearl River Delta. Policy issuance quality is critical to the effectiveness of redevelopment efforts. Since 2009, the redevelopment of collective-owned industrial land in Guangzhou has transformed from a market-driven three-olds renewal to government-led inefficient land redevelopment. This shift has made evaluating the effectiveness of multisource policies increasingly challenging. Analyzing the textual quality of existing policies and the evolution of redevelopment policies can provide valuable insights for policy adjustments in the era of inefficient land redevelopment. Considering policy system analysis, this study constructed an analytical framework encompassing “policy structure-policy instruments-policy effectiveness,” employed bibliometric and content analysis methods, and quantitatively examined the structural features, instrument characteristics, and effectiveness of policies related to collective-owned industrial land redevelopment in Guangzhou from 2009 to 2024. Policy optimization suggestions are proposed based on these findings. The results indicate that: 1) Governance of collective-owned industrial land redevelopment involves multiple functional departments, with policy formulation primarily coordinated by the municipal government and led by the Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology and the Municipal Bureau of Planning and Natural Resources. Through enhancement and strengthening of the territorial land-use control system, policy evolution has progressed through three stages: “stimulation-strict control-supervision.” 2) From “three-olds renewal” to “inefficient land redevelopment,” high-level urban renewal policy institutions have driven the evolution of policy objectives and promoted the iteration of policy instruments. Since 2015, Guangzhou has primarily relied on incentive-based renewal policy instruments to promote village-level industrial parks, providing low-cost industrial spaces through “industrial-to-industrial redevelopment” by expanding land acquisition, enhancing interest incentives for redevelopment, and improving legal procedures for historical land. 3) The overall synergistic performance of collective-owned industrial land redevelopment policies is strong, with higher-level policies demonstrating better coordination performance than lower-level policies. According to PMC model calculations, the completeness of policy timeliness and policy perspectives was relatively low, whereas that of policy fields, forms, and goals was relatively high. Despite the continuous iteration of collective industrial land renewal policies, issues such as insufficient interdepartmental collaboration, incomplete pilot policy frameworks, and a lack of policy diversity remain. We recommend enhancing support for industrial investment promotion and operation and maintenance in back-end policy instruments and strengthening spatial differentiation in policy content. To improve policy synergy, it is advisable to restructure the policy issuance framework, ensure stability by extending policy validity, and increase precision by refining district-level policies. Synergy among policies from different departments is crucial for the successful implementation of initiatives. The marginal contribution of this study lies in establishing a quantitative evaluation framework for the systematic analysis of collective-owned industrial land redevelopment policies, which is innovative in the theoretical exploration and empirical analysis of public policy systems.
As urban spaces become increasingly mediated, the role of digital media in reshaping commercial gentrification and intensifying sociospatial inequality has emerged as a new research frontier. While existing studies have largely focused on the digital representations of gentrification, few have systematically examined the complex multidirectional interactions between digital media and gentrification. To bridge this gap, this study drew on the geographies of media and communication and conducted an in-depth case study of Shanghai’s Wukang Road. This historic neighborhood has undergone a rapid commercial transformation in the digital era. Data were collected using a mixed-methods approach, including fieldwork, in-depth interviews with 26 stakeholders, and an analysis of online resources. This methodological triangulation enabled a nuanced understanding of how place representations constructed by different stakeholders, namely the state, market, and society, contributed to the reconstruction of commercial gentrification through various communication arcs. The findings revealed that local governments and state-affiliated digital media serve as primary drivers of commercial gentrification. Through urban regeneration projects and city branding campaigns, they construct authoritative representations of place that emphasize cultural heritage preservation and tourism development, while strategically minimizing discussion of displacement effects. Notably, local governments remain responsive to digital discourse, adopting adaptive urban strategies informed by online trends and public feedback, creating a process conceptualized as integrative communication arcs. Social groups, particularly potential gentrifiers, are attracted through connective communication arcs and actively produce and circulate pro-consumption representations on digital media. These users have become new drivers of gentrification, as their pursuit of aestheticized, shareable consumption experiences motivates market actors to reconstruct commercial spaces both discursively and materially. In response, investors and businesses engage in interactive communication arcs, continuously adjusting their retail landscapes and visual designs based on digital engagement metrics and trending consumption ideals. Business strategies evolve to accommodate the "check-in" culture and photographic requirements of digital platforms, with establishments frequently modifying facades, interiors, and merchandise displays to enhance their online appeal. This often involves replacing local businesses with establishments that cater to global aesthetic preferences, thereby leading to cultural displacement. Through these cyclical arcs of communication, the selective amplification of certain place representations—especially those aligned with elite consumption and state-supported tourism—accelerated the reconstruction of gentrified spaces. This process leads to tangible sociospatial outcomes, including landscape homogenization, cultural displacement, and the marginalization of low-income residents and traditional businesses. The study concludes that the dynamic interplay between digital media and commercial gentrification is structurally shaped by power-capital relations, even as it appears to be driven by participatory and decentralized communication. The Wukang Road case provides transferable insights for cities worldwide undergoing deepening mediatization and suggests that digital platforms may systematically reinforce exclusionary forms of heritage-based regeneration.
In the context of China's urban transition from large-scale expansion to intensive regeneration, the establishment of a scientific priority assessment mechanism for the renovation of old residential communities has become a critical yet challenging task in urban governance. This study aimed to address the prevailing challenges in contemporary decision-making processes, including the complexity of quantifying public needs and the absence of a comprehensive city-wide perspective. To this end, a novel data-driven priority evaluation framework was proposed using an empirical case study of Hangzhou. Methodologically, this study introduces key innovations. First, a Graph Neural Network (GNN) model incorporating spatial semantics was developed in order to identify the construction era of residential communities, achieving a high-precision recognition rate of 97.6% and effectively overcoming the limitations of traditional image classification. Second, a Large Language Model (LLM) is employed to perform a fine-grained sentiment analysis of geotagged social media texts, and a geographically weighted approach is applied to spatially quantify public sentiment at the neighborhood scale. Third, moving beyond conventional facility-oriented evaluation, an integrated three-dimensional indicator system was constructed, covering problem urgency, implementation feasibility, and potential benefits. Priority assessment was conducted using an XGBoost model, and its robustness was strengthened through Monte Carlo simulation and full-gradient sensitivity analysis, ensuring reliable and stable ranking outcomes across all
Urban development in China has moved away from a period of rapid incremental expansion toward a structural transition defined by the optimization of existing land stock. While national strategies now mandate a shift toward high-quality and inclusive growth, some local governance practices remain influenced by established patterns of land finance dependency and urban space commoditization. This study identifies the “Institutional Exploration Phase” in Guangzhou as the period between the launch of the “Three Olds” transformation pilot in 2009 and the 2021 directive issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development to prevent large-scale demolition and construction. The primary objective is to systematically diagnose how municipal policy frameworks distribute policy attention across competing urban values, thereby revealing the underlying logic of local governance. This study employs a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative thematic analysis with systematic textual analysis to uncover the priorities embedded within policy documents. The research corpus consisted of 59 core municipal policy texts selected for their policy relevance and representativeness. Documents were indexed in a spreadsheet and coded in NVivo, yielding 2,376 coded instances across 20 subcategories organized into eight overarching themes. This analysis revealed a significant systemic imbalance. The themes of “Land and Property Rights” and “Industry and Investment” dominated, with land-related issues alone accounting for 550 coded instances, forming a dependency structure in which investment incentives and industrial regulations serve primarily as instruments to facilitate land value capture. In contrast, the themes of “Ecology and Landscape” and “History and Culture” remain at the structural periphery of the policy framework, together accounting for less than 11% of total policy attention. Ecological measures focus on visual aesthetics and urban image enhancement, rather than on substantive environmental resilience. Similarly, cultural protection logic exhibits a selective bias toward tangible assets suitable for tourism development, such as historic relics. Meanwhile, intangible values that underpin local life, including community memory and informal social networks, receive relatively limited institutional support. This policy bias is the product of three interlocking institutional factors: assetization path dependence under fiscal constraints, high transaction costs arising from fragmented property rights, and the relative insufficiency of mechanisms for delivering public value. While the official discourse has adopted the narrative of urban regeneration, the operational logic in some localities remains substantially influenced by land-centric development. The uneven distribution of policy attention has solidified the value hierarchy led by land value appreciation. This reveals a gap between local practices and national high-quality development goals, which is partly attributable to policy transmission lags and local contextual adjustment. In response to the legal transition initiated by the 2024 Guangzhou Urban Village Transformation Regulations, this study proposes three key interventions: refining the existing transfer and cross-site balance mechanism for cultural heritage plot ratios; reconstructing multi-dimensional performance evaluation systems; and promoting full-cycle operation-oriented financing. Such measures aim to improve multivalue coordination mechanisms and provide a theoretical reference for optimizing urban regeneration institutional design.
Accurate estimation of old residential building stock and its associated property value is the basic objective of urban renewal planning. In China, rapid urbanization has produced a substantial legacy of residential housing constructed before 2000, yet comprehensive estimates of the old residential building stock and its economic value at the national city scale remain scarce. This gap in the literature limits the development of differentiated renewal strategies and efficient resource allocation across cities. To address this issue, this study develops a city-level assessment framework by integrating multiple data sources, including pre-2000 built-up area boundaries, official statistical yearbooks, high-resolution remote sensing imagery, and housing transaction records from real estate platforms. Using this framework, we estimated the total floor area and property value of old residential housing (constructed before 2000 and still extant) across 611 Chinese cities. We further evaluated the potential value uplift from urban renewal under a hypothetical 15% appreciation scenario while explicitly incorporating inter-city population mobility as a key factor. Based on these estimates, we examined the spatial heterogeneity of old residential building stock, housing asset value, and urban renewal potential across cities of different sizes and regions. The main findings are as follows: (1) The total old residential building stock across 611 cities is estimated at approximately 3 605 078 700 m2, revealing both its enormous scale and pronounced spatial concentration. The national old residential building stock is highly concentrated in a relatively small number of super-large megacities, which together account for a disproportionately large share of the national total. Marked regional differences have been observed in the historical pace of demolition and redevelopment. Eastern cities exhibited the highest demolition rates, whereas northeastern cities had the lowest rates. From a north-south perspective, southern cities are characterized by both relatively high demolition rates and large remaining stocks, whereas northern cities generally display lower demolition rates and smaller remaining stocks, reflecting distinct development trajectories and policy implementation. (2) The total property value of old residential housing is estimated at approximately 480 293.77 billion yuan, with inter-city disparities in asset value substantially exceeding those in physical building stock. This finding indicates that identical residential floor areas may possess markedly different economic values depending on local housing markets and regional economic conditions. Under the 15% appreciation scenario, after accounting for net population migration, super-large and megacities experiencing sustained population inflows are projected to achieve considerable value gains through urban renewal, whereas small- and medium-sized cities facing population decline exhibit much weaker appreciation potential. These results suggest that the economic benefits of urban renewal depend not only on physical redevelopment but also on demographic dynamics and effective housing demand. (3) Cities of different sizes face distinct renewal challenges and require different policy strategies. In super-large and megacities, the principal constraints arise from the massive scale of old residential building stock, fragmented property rights structures, and increasing pressure on urban governance and infrastructure systems. By contrast, old residential housing in small and medium-sized cities generally has weaker asset attributes and lower market liquidity. Consequently, renewal efforts in these cities should prioritize improvements in residential living conditions and public welfare, rather than asset-oriented redevelopment. Overall, this study highlights the importance of regional differences in urban renewal strategies that jointly consider the distribution of old residential building stocks, housing market conditions, and demographic changes, thereby providing a scientific basis for differentiated urban renewal policies in China.
Subjective Well-Being (SWB) is an important indicator of quality of life, social stability, and high-quality economic development and social sustainability. Because women often balance multiple social and family roles, their time allocation differs substantially across activity types, which may substantially influence their SWB. Previous research has primarily examined the average effects of time use on well-being, while paying relatively little attention to the spatial heterogeneity of these relationships. Using data from the 2021 China Time Use Survey, this study investigates the regional distribution of women's SWB and examines how different time use patterns influence SWB across regions and between urban and rural areas. An ordered Logit model is employed to estimate the effects of time allocation while controlling for individual characteristics, household attributes, and subjective environmental evaluations. The results indicate that: (1) Women's SWB exhibits significant spatial disparities across China. Higher levels are observed in the southeastern coastal provinces and several inland provinces (e.g., Gansu and Hubei), whereas the western and northeastern regions generally report relatively lower levels. (2) Different types of time use exert heterogeneous effects on women's SWB. Time allocated to personal care, learning and training, and leisure activities significantly enhances SWB, whereas work and commuting time significantly reduce it. Housework exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with SWB, suggesting that moderate participation in household activities enhances well-being, whereas excessive housework becomes a source of burden. These effects also vary across regions. The negative effects of work and commuting are strongest in eastern China; the positive effects of personal care and the nonlinear effect of housework are more pronounced in central China; women's well-being in western China is jointly influenced by the burden of travel and the positive role of personal care; and learning and training contribute more substantially to well-being in northeastern China. Marked urban-rural differences are also observed. Urban women's well-being is primarily constrained by work and commuting demands, whereas rural women's well-being benefits more from personal care and learning activities but is adversely affected by longer travel time. (3) Beyond time use, women's SWB is significantly associated with individual characteristics, household structure, and subjective evaluations of the living environment. These findings demonstrate that the relationship between time use and SWB is spatially contingent rather than universal. Understanding women's well-being requires consideration of individual time-allocation patterns and broader regional development and socio-spatial contexts. The findings provide empirical evidence to support the development of region-specific public service provisions and time-support policies to improve women's well-being.
Socio-spatial differentiation is a key lens through which regional inequality, public service mismatch, and the spatial basis of common prosperity can be understood. Existing research has provided extensive evidence of intra-urban differentiation in large cities, but less attention has been paid to how social groups and resources are reorganized within provinces, particularly at the township and subdistrict scales. This scale is especially important in highly urbanized and regionally integrated provinces, where social differentiation is shaped not only by internal urban structures but also by provincial development gradients, transport corridors, county-level hierarchies, and urban-rural interactions. Taking Jiangsu Province, one of China’s most developed coastal provinces, as a case study, this research aims to identify fine-grained socio-spatial differentiation patterns among townships and sub-districts and to explain the mechanisms through which these patterns are produced. This study used 1,423 townships and subdistricts in Jiangsu Province as spatial units and integrated Baidu Huiyan population profile data with nighttime light data. A multidimensional indicator system was constructed to capture population size and density, age structure, income level, consumption capacity, and educational attainment. Natural break classification was first applied to reveal the spatial distribution of individual social attributes, and population-weighted k-means clustering was then used to identify the major socio-spatial types. By incorporating the population size of each township or sub-district into the clustering procedure, this approach avoids treating sparsely populated peripheral units and densely populated urban units as equally influential, thereby improving the social interpretability of the classification results. The results indicate that socio-spatial differentiation in Jiangsu Province is characterized by a clear multiscale nested structure. At the provincial scale, higher-level social attributes, including high income, strong consumption capacity, and high educational attainment, were mainly concentrated in southern Jiangsu, whereas many areas in northern Jiangsu showed relatively weaker social and economic profiles. At the corridor scale, high-level social groups are organized along the Shanghai-Nanjing corridor, Yangtze River development belt, and surrounding areas of major cities. At the county scale, social attributes often decline from urban cores, development zones, and county seats toward surrounding townships, forming a concentric structure of core agglomeration and peripheral weakening. These findings show that provincial gradients, axial development, and county-level spatial organization are intertwined rather than operating independently. Population-weighted clustering identified four primary socio-spatial types. Urban core high-level social areas and metropolitan fringe new town-industrial park social areas are mainly located in southern Jiangsu, along the Yangtze River and Shanghai-Nanjing corridor, and around major urban centers. These areas are characterized by populations with a higher income, stronger consumption capacity, and higher educational attainment, representing the main spaces of social and economic agglomeration. Medium-development townships are widely distributed in ordinary towns, county-level nodes, and county seats, functioning as transitional spaces between high-level urban areas and relatively weak peripheral areas. Relatively underdeveloped northern townships are mainly distributed in the hinterlands of northern Jiangsu, the Lixiahe region of central Jiangsu, and the peripheral areas of prefecture-level cities, where low income, consumption capacity, and educational attainment tend to overlap. The resulting pattern is not a simple north-south divide but a composite structure of a core-periphery hierarchy, axial agglomeration, and hinterland continuity. The formation of this pattern can be understood as a recursive process in which economic gradients, factor mobility, and institutional arrangements reinforce each other. The regional economic capacity provides a basic opportunity structure for employment, income growth, consumption upgrades, and human capital accumulation. Industrial upgrading, labor mobility, housing costs, and commuting accessibility further select and reorganize different social groups across space, whereas administrative resource allocation, public service provision, development zone construction, ecological regulation, and the inertia of the built environment consolidate existing differences and increase the path dependence of sociospatial differentiation. This study contributes to the literature by extending socio-spatial differentiation research from the intra-urban scale to the provincial township/subdistrict scale and by revealing the internal heterogeneity of a developed province that is often obscured by prefecture-level or county-level averages. The findings provide empirical evidence for differentiated public service allocation, county-level capacity enhancement, and spatial governance oriented toward coordinated regional development and common prosperity.
For a considerable period following China’s reform and opening-up, local governments were required to make substantial efforts to promote economic growth, primarily by improving administrative governance efficiency through overtime work. Existing research has focused on overtime in the private sector but has paid limited attention to overtime in the public sector, particularly in local governments. Whether an optimal range of local government overtime exists and how overtime relates to economic growth remain unclear. Accordingly, this study uses high-frequency satellite nighttime light data to measure the intensity of local government overtime in China from 2012 to 2024. The Jenks natural breaks classification method is used to illustrate the spatial distribution of overtime intensity among different groups of local governments. Markov chains are employed to examine the dynamic evolution of overtime intensity, while the Theil index is used to identify regional differences and their sources. Finally, econometric models are used to test the economic effects and underlying mechanisms of local government overtime. The findings are as follows: (1) The intensity of local government overtime in China exhibits fluctuating upward and downward trends, as well as a spatial distribution characterized by higher levels in the north and lower levels in the south. (2) The intensity of local government overtime is relatively stable, although cross-level transitions remain possible. Overtime intensity in neighboring areas also has significant spatial spillover effects on individual cities. (3) Regional differences in the intensity of local government overtime have decreased. The interregional Theil index is higher than the intraregional index, indicating that differences between regions are the primary source of variation in local government overtime. (4) Local government overtime has an inverted U-shaped impact on urban economic growth, with administrative governance efficiency playing a substantial role in this relationship. This study makes two academic contributions. First, it extends the use of satellite nighttime light data, which have previously been applied to depict overtime in enterprises, to the measurement of local government overtime intensity. This extension broadens the method’s application from the enterprise level to the government level. The study also examines the spatiotemporal patterns of local government overtime using time-series data, thereby providing empirical data for further research on overtime among local governments. Second, this study proposes and tests the inverted U-shaped impact of local government overtime on urban economic growth through changes in administrative governance efficiency. The findings demonstrate that continuously increasing overtime intensity to improve administrative governance efficiency and promote urban economic growth is not advisable. They therefore provide empirical support for further advancing policies aimed at reducing the burden on local governments.
In high-density cities, the built environment may influence respiratory health by altering exposure to air pollution, yet systematic evidence on the causal chain linking the “built environment-multiple pollutants-tuberculosis (TB),” along with urban-suburban heterogeneity and threshold responses, remains limited. Taking the urban core of Hangzhou as a case study, this study has integrated data on TB incidence, built-environment attributes, and air pollutants (2015-2019) and applies a time fixed-effects model, multiple-mediation analysis, and random-forest modeling to identify overall effects, causal pathways, and nonlinear thresholds. Our results have revealed four main findings. (1) Building density, land-use mix, road-network density, and transport facility density were significantly and positively associated with TB incidence, whereas green spaces (measured by NDVI) showed a significantly stronger protective effect in the central city than in the suburbs. (2) Air pollution served as a critical mediator, accounting for approximately 37%~52% of the total effect of the built environment on TB incidence. Among the six pollutants, PM2.5 and NO2 dominated the mediating pathways, with their contributions being notably higher in the central city (up to 48% and 32%, respectively) compared to the suburban area (31% and 21%). Moreover, green space exhibited a protective mediated effect by simultaneously reducing the concentrations of multiple pollutants, thereby indirectly lowering the TB risk. (3) Consistent nonlinear relationships were identified. Land-use mix followed a U-shaped curve: the low-risk range of TB incidence was observed between 1.45 and 2.05 (Shannon’s evenness index), beyond which TB risk increased sharply. Green spaces also showed a U-shaped association, with the optimal health benefit occurring at an NDVI of approximately 0.625; both lower and higher NDVI values were associated with elevated TB incidence. (4) The effect sizes and thresholds were generally higher in the central city than in the suburban areas, indicating a stronger built environment-health linkage in densely built areas. Theoretically, this study extends the explanatory framework for infectious respiratory diseases by explicitly incorporating multiple-pollutant mediation and threshold identification, moving beyond single-pollutant or linear assumptions. Practically, our findings have provided quantitative evidence for zoned and tiered urban planning interventions, including density control, mixed-land-use optimization, green space quality enhancement, and traffic-related pollution mitigation.
Neighborhood interactions are important for public health and social governance. However, as China has undergone rapid urbanization, such interactions have declined. Existing research on how the built environment affects such interactions falls short of capturing the unique features and mechanisms of high-density, diverse, and multi-layered urban contexts. Guangzhou was used as a case study, covering 52 residential neighborhoods and 1,009 household questionnaires. This study systematically explores how the built environment shapes neighborhood interaction outcomes (frequency, diversity, and relational quality), distills its underlying mechanisms, and examines the contextual responses across five types of neighborhoods. Twenty-one built environment indicators were measured at two scales: the neighborhood site and 500 m/
Second-home sojourn has become a new lifestyle in recent years, and it has noticeably transformed socio-spatial structures and intensified conflicts between hosts and guests in second-home sojourn destinations. Previous studies have often highlighted cultural and economic differences but paid insufficient attention to the core issue: the mismatch between static urban spatial supply and the dynamic demands of diverse groups. To fill this research gap, this study took Sanya City as a case study and applied the time-geography theory to investigate the spatiotemporal behavioral patterns of second-home sojourners and the formation mechanism of host-guest spatial conflict. This research combined semi-structured interviews, activity diary surveys, and urban POI data, complemented by content analysis and spatial analysis methods.The results were as follows: First, second-home sojourners have a strong regularity and multiple peaks in their daily activity rhythms. The shopping behaviour has an obvious distance decay effect, presenting a dispersed but locally clustered pattern; in contrast, their leisure activities had long travel distances, complex rules, and high dependence on high-quality public spaces such as waterfronts and greenspaces.Additionally, their spatio-temporal behaviors were also characterized by the wave-like of the urban resource. Second, spatial use conflicts between second-home sojourners and local residents are directly reflected in these two aspects. On the one hand, inconsistent spatiotemporal behaviors lead to conflicts such as noise disturbance, while the seasonal migration of sojourners results in a shortage of public resources in peak seasons and idleness in the off-season. However, the overlap of their spatiotemporal behaviors in travel, shopping, leisure, and other daily activities has triggered fierce competition for public transport, commercial facilities, and public space resources. Essentially, these conflicts originate from the structural imbalance in spatial practices among vulnerable local residents, power forces, and capital entities. Third, this study innovatively puts forward new ideas for the spatial governance of second-home sojour tourism cities. Based on the concept of the daily-life cycle, this study constructs a theoretical framework for a sojourn-friendly urban daily life circle system, aiming to solve the urban spatial problems caused by sojourn. Breaking through the limitations of traditional daily-life circle theories, which consider only local residents as the sole subject, this framework equally incorporates sojourners into consideration. It shifts urban planning thinking from a space supply oriented mode to a differentiated behavioral demand-oriented mode and regards non-human actors such as urban spatial elements as core participants to realize the coordinated development of spatial networks in second-home sojourn cities.
As coastal tourism worldwide grows increasingly symbolic and commercialized, ordinary urban public beaches have become important sites for everyday ecological leisure and the physical and psychological recuperation of urban residents. However, a research paradigm dominated by the tourist gaze, with its emphasis on scenic consumption, the extraordinary, and the experience of the visiting outsider, has obscured the multiple values of urban public beaches as sites for residents’ everyday practice. Drawing on Oldenburg’s third place theory, this study examined two urban public beaches in Zhuhai to investigate how residents construct beach spaces through everyday leisure practices. Data were gathered through thirty-three semi-structured interviews with participants spanning a range of ages and social backgrounds, together with observation and autoethnography, and analyzed using grounded theory coding. The study has found that the quality of a beach as a third place does not rest solely on its physical endowment but is generated dynamically through residents’ frequent everyday leisure encounters and their sustained perception of its multidimensional spatial qualities. This construction unfolds along an interwoven two-layered path running from material function to emotional meaning. Through bodily practice, residents perceive four functional qualities: accessibility, healthfulness, safety, and involvement, which together form the preconditions for the beach to be embedded in and repeatedly used in daily life. Through emotional investment, residents endow the beach with four affective qualities-ease, inclusiveness, a sense of possession, and sociability-thereby generating emotional attachment and transforming it into a genuine third place. This construction is broadly shared across age groups and social groups, transcending structural identity divisions. The urban public beach thus becomes a “nearby intertidal zone” within urban life. Through its hybrid natural-social character, it answers modern city dwellers’ need for authenticity to draw close to nature and rebuild social connections. This study makes three main contributions to the literature. First, it identifies the natural-social hybrid third place as a new subtype and clarifies the mechanism by which it is generated through dual embedding in social relations and the natural material environment. Second, it advances third place research from the static identification of types toward the analysis of a dynamic process of construction, showing how residents’ repeated, embodied, and affective everyday practices turn an ordinary public space into a third place. Third, by redefining the beach from a tourist destination under the tourist gaze into a site of everyday practice, it lends empirical support to the everyday life and dwelling turns in tourism studies. These findings have direct implications for coastal city governance. Sustaining a beach’s everyday accessibility, naturalness, and low degree of structuration often holds greater value for everyday leisure than introducing commercialized or landscaped projects. The same logic extends to other natural-social hybrid public spaces such as urban parks, waterfront greenways, and community gardens.
The rapid growth of the internet and social media has significantly enhanced the role of tourism landscape photographs in destination image communication and in shaping potential tourists’ destination choices. As an important form of visual representation, tourism landscape photographs not only convey spatial, environmental, and cultural information but also influence viewers’ visual attention, affective responses, aesthetic judgments, and behavioral intentions. To investigate the visual processing characteristics and subjective perceptual differences associated with different types of tourism landscape photographs, three categories of images were used as experimental stimuli: natural, cultural, and mixed landscapes. A laboratory-based eye-tracking experiment was combined with subjective perception scales to examine eye-movement indicators and perceptual evaluations of 84 participants while they viewed standardized landscape photographs. The results indicated that different types of tourism landscape photographs elicit distinct patterns of visual attention. Natural landscape photographs were mainly characterized by dispersed scanning, suggesting that participants tended to explore visual information across a wider spatial range. By contrast, cultural landscape photographs induced more concentrated and sustained fixations, indicating that viewers were more likely to focus on specific objects, architectural elements, or symbolic features. Mixed landscape photographs show a multifocal and alternating exploratory pattern, reflecting the interaction between natural and cultural visual elements within the same image. Significant differences were also observed in participants’ subjective evaluations of the three landscape types. Natural landscapes received higher scores for pleasure, tranquility, perceived psychological restoration, and recommendation intention, suggesting a stronger capacity to evoke positive emotional and restorative experiences. Mixed landscapes perform particularly well in terms of visual attractiveness, implying that a combination of natural and cultural elements may enhance the overall visual appeal of tourism images. By contrast, cultural landscapes received relatively lower scores across multiple perceptual dimensions. Pairwise comparisons revealed significant differences in most perceptual indicators between natural and cultural landscapes as well as between mixed and cultural landscapes. However, the difference between the natural and mixed landscapes was significant only for perceived psychological restoration. Spearman’s correlation analysis showed that restorative emotional experience was significantly and positively correlated with landscape evaluation and behavioral preferences under all three landscape conditions. This finding suggests that perceived restoration plays an important role in shaping viewers’ overall appraisals of tourism landscapes and their willingness to recommend them. However, eye-movement indicators, such as fixation duration, fixation frequency, and fixation patterns, did not show stable or significant correlations with subjective perceptual factors. These results have indicated that although different types of tourism landscape photographs generate distinct visual processing patterns and subjective evaluations, visual attention behavior cannot be directly equated with subjective perceptual experience. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence to understand the perceptual mechanisms underlying viewers’ responses to tourism landscape photographs. The findings contribute to the research on visual perception in tourism contexts and offer practical implications for the selection of tourism landscape photographs, destination visual communication, and the optimization of landscape image presentation in digital tourism marketing.
Betel nuts (Areca catechu L.) are an important economic crop in the tropical regions of China, particularly in the Hainan Province. However, the frequent occurrence of pests and diseases has severely constrained sustainable development of the betel nut industry. Traditional pest monitoring methods rely primarily on manual field inspections, which are not only inefficient but also susceptible to subjective bias. Remote sensing technologies based on unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites have partially improved monitoring capabilities; however, in tropical regions, they often suffer from limited data timeliness and strong interference from cloud cover and rainfall. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have provided a new technological pathway for proactive pest monitoring; however, deploying sensor networks in complex field environments remains a significant challenge. To address these issues, this study aims to construct a Betel Nut Sensor-Location Problem (BNS-LP) model and systematically evaluate the effectiveness of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in solving this complex spatial optimization problem, in comparison with traditional exact and heuristic algorithms. This study was conducted in the betel nut planting area in the town of Beida, Wanning City, Hainan Province, China. A Geodetector model was employed to quantitatively analyze the influence of multiple factors, such as topography, climate, land cover, and road networks, on the spatial heterogeneity of environmental vulnerability across betel nut planting areas, thereby characterizing the spatially differentiated monitoring demand. During model construction, the BNS-LP was formulated based on the Maximum Covering Location Problem (MCLP), with environmental vulnerability weights derived from multi-source spatial analysis incorporated as demand priorities alongside explicit cost constraints into the traditional framework to guide a vulnerability-oriented, non-uniform sensor deployment strategy. In the algorithmic implementation stage, the model was solved and comparatively analyzed using the Gurobi Optimizer, a Genetic Algorithm (GA), and DRL approach. These results have indicated that the environmental vulnerability of betel nut planting areas exhibits pronounced spatial heterogeneity shaped by multiple interacting factors. Geodetector analysis showed that forest distribution (
Benggang is a typical erosional hazard landform in the hilly regions of southern China that poses a serious threat to soil conservation and ecological stability. The developmental history of Benggang records its formation and subsequent evolution, thus providing an important basis for exploring its evolutionary mechanisms. However, owing to a lack of absolute chronological constraints, the long-term developmental processes of Benggang prior to modern observations remain unclear. In this study, a frontal diluvial fan of Benggang in Chengdong Village, Wuhua County, Guangdong Province, was selected as the research object, and five luminescence dating samples were collected. Coarse- and fine-grained quartz were dated using the single-aliquot regenerative (SAR) protocol, whereas single-grain K-feldspar was dated using post-infrared stimulated luminescence (pIRIR). These methods were used to determine the burial ages of Benggang deposits and evaluate the applicability of luminescence dating in near-source, short-transport, and rapidly deposited environments. Based on this, the developmental history of Benggang in the Meizhou region of northeastern Guangdong was reconstructed by integrating paleoclimatic proxies and records of human activity in South China. To ensure the reliability of the measurement procedures, preheat plateau and dose recovery tests were conducted to select suitable preheating and stimulation-temperature combinations. The results showed that (1) luminescence characteristics differ significantly among minerals and grain sizes. Coarse-grained quartz exhibits weak luminescence signals and low sensitivity, making it difficult to obtain reliable equivalent doses. Fine-grained quartz has stronger signals; however, incomplete bleaching and multigrain averaging lead to systematic age overestimation, and the obtained ages do not conform to the stratigraphic relationship between younger ages upward and older ages downward. In contrast, the single-grain K-feldspar pIR50IR150 effectively identified well-bleached grains. The overdispersion (OD) values of all samples exceeded 100%, indicating highly dispersed equivalent dose (De) distributions and heterogeneous bleaching of the sediments. (2) The Minimum Age Model (MAM) was used to extract the well-bleached grain population for age calculation. Because a residual dose of approximately 2 Gy remained after 48 h of exposure in the solar simulator, this residual dose was subtracted from the final age calculation. After correction, the burial ages from top to bottom of the profile are 0.5 ± 0.1 ka, 0.3 ± 0.1 ka, 0.8 ± 0.2 ka, and 1.5 ± 0.3 ka. (3) The age-depth model indicates that this Benggang began to develop at least 1.5 ± 0.3 ka ago, and deposition at this site continued until after 0.3 ± 0.1 ka. Before approximately 0.9 ka, Benggang development was mainly controlled by a humid climate and intense rainfall. During this period, the population of Guangdong was relatively small, land development intensity was limited, and the diluvial fan deposition rate was relatively slow. In later stages, the migration of the Hakka people and the expansion of slope agriculture intensified vegetation destruction, surface disturbance, and reduced soil erosion resistance. Consequently, human activity has become an important factor in Benggang development. The results of this study suggest that coarse- and fine-grained quartz luminescence dating has limited reliability for rapidly deposited Benggang sediments, whereas single-grain K-feldspar pIRIR combined with MAM can effectively identify well-bleached grains and provide reliable chronological constraints. This work provides a methodological investigation and a chronological basis for understanding Benggang formation, developmental mechanisms, and long-term human-environment interactions in South China.
