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Rational allocation of healthcare facilities is a key component of planning strategies in promoting public health and wellbeing worldwide. Many Chinese cities have been experiencing population loss, making it challenging to match the supply and demand of healthcare facilities accurately. How to plan healthcare facilities to improve spatial accessibility in shrinking cities is still an underresearched topic. Taking Lufeng in China as the case, we used residential electricity consumption rate as proxy data to rectify the actual population distribution and used Gaussian two-step floating catchment area (G2SFCA) to evaluate the spatial accessibility of hierarchical healthcare facilities for making recommendations to improve the planning of healthcare facilities in shrinking cities to achieve better spatial accessibility. Our findings indicated that: (1) the supply and demand of healthcare facilities were generally not well matched, especially in the fringe area; (2) the sudden influx population during festival periods placed additional burden on medical resources in the fringe area and its spatial accessibility, especially on township hospitals and community healthcare services; and (3) to promote the spatial accessibility of healthcare facilities in shrinking cities, we proposed related planning strategies regarding the targeted allocation of three-level healthcare facilities to match the hierarchical diagnosis and treatment, and flexible setting of mobile healthcare facilities and telemedicine to echo the temporal population changes. These findings can provide references for improving livelihood health in cities experiencing population loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The governance of urban shrinkage has recently become an important topic for geographers and urban planners. However, a comprehensive exploration of the various spatial problems and governance paths in shrinking cities remains a huge gap in urban shrinkage governance literature. Building on the review and induction of extensive literature, this paper constructs a theoretical framework for the spatial governance of urban shrinkage from four perspectives: conceptual connotations, influencing factors, paths, and effects. By field investigation and policy interpretation, it takes Jixi City as a case, a coal-based shrinking city in China, to explore the policy response of the government and their effects. We find that the spatial governance of Jixi is a process of multisubject participation and multielement integration focusing on various spatial issues, which confirms the rationality of the analytical framework. Also, there are both similarities and differences in the spatial governance of urban shrinkage between Western countries and Chinese. This study enriches the theory of urban shrinkage governance, shows Chinese characteristics in urban governance, and provides governance enlightenment for other shrinking cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban shrinkage has gradually become an issue of world-concerning social matter. As urbanization progresses, some Chinese cities are experiencing population loss and economic decline. Our study attempts to correct and integrate DMSP/OLS and NPP/VIIRS data to complete the identification and measurement of shrinking cities in China's Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB). We identified 36 shrinking cities and 644 shrinking counties on the municipal and county scales. Based on this approach, we established the average urban shrinkage intensity index and the urban shrinkage frequency index, attempting to find out the causes of shrinking cities for different shrinkage characteristics, city types and shrinkage frequencies. The results show that (1) the shrinking cities are mainly concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta city cluster, the midstream city cluster and the Chengdu–Chongqing economic circle. (2) Most shrinking cities have a moderate frequency of shrinking, dominated by low–low clusters. Resource-based, heavy industrial, small and medium-sized cities are more inclined to shrink. (3) The single economic structure, the difficulty of industrial transformation and the lack of linkage among county-level cities are possible reasons for the urban shrinkage in the YREB. Exploring the causes of urban shrinkage from a more micro perspective will be an inevitable task for sustainable development in YREB and even in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the transformation of China's industry and demographic structure, urban shrinkage, especially the resource-based cities due to their single industrial structure, tend to emerge gradually. Using empirical and quantitative methods, this paper explores the evolution mechanism of urban shrinkage in Hegang, a resource-based city in China. Our findings suggest that there are many correlations or cyclic relationships among variables, which provide an empirical confirmation for the complexity of urban shrinkage process. The result shows there is a time delay of about four to five years between the mining industry and the changes of demographic profile, economic performance and built environment variables. The development of Hegang has formed a path dependence on resource-based industries. Furthermore, the time lags between demographic profile and economic performance variables are not obvious, and the real estate market has a certain sensitivity to perceive population loss and economic change. Besides, market led public service facilities are more sensitive to the changes of population outflow and economic recession than government led public service facilities. The study findings could offer insights for other resource-based cities in developing countries to employ on the economic development policies issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]