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The improvement of well-being of residents is the core of the people-centred urbanization. Inhabitants’ emphasis on healthy lifestyle draws attention to the provision of sports infrastructure. However, the spatial pattern of sport infrastructure development and in particular the driving forces from urbanization across China have not been examined yet in the literature. This paper aims to explore how the national sports infrastructure in mainland China is driven and scaled by urbanization, using data from the sixth National Sports Venues Census and a multi-scale geographically weighted regression approach. The results revealed strong regional inequality in the development of sports infrastructure in the stage of accelerating urbanization in China, with better provision of sports infrastructure in eastern than in western regions. The three dimensions of urbanization (urban population, public financial expenditure and built-up area) significantly explained the spatial disparity between 289 cities at prefecture-city level. There should be a feedback loop between the accumulative developments of urbanization and sports infrastructure. The contributing driving forces and subsequent regional heterogeneity suggest that sports space theory, the inequality amplification model, and hysteresis effect are comparatively suitable for explaining the spatial inequality characteristics of sports infrastructure development in China. A Sport Inequality Alert was conceptualized as a policy instrument for monitoring regional inequality and governing the development of sports infrastructure. It is argued that sports infrastructure development should be integrated into the national strategy for sustainable New-type Urbanization.

Infant mortality (IM) represents the overall health of a country or region as it relates to access to medicine, health care, and clean water in a population. IM remains understudied in many areas of Uganda, as many studies are from urban the capital (Kampala). The long-term goal of this research is the mitigation of IM and poor pregnancy outcomes in Uganda. Insights gained from geographic distribution of IM will allow adaptation of diagnosis, treatments, and interventions within the studied areas. Through using OLS and geographically weighted regression, this study has explored the significant factors and their heterogeneous and scaling effects in 2016 across Uganda. The empirical findings from this study include a significant association between IM and both being unmarried and preferring to speak Luganda when interviewed. Those unmarried may lack a social network to assist with income, childcare, and household chores representing decreased resources. Additionally, being interviewed in Luganda was associated over a large geographic area, which may represent not being comfortable in English, which is the language of education, commerce, and presumably health care, thus suggesting a disconnect with health care settings. These data suggest that strides can be made in Uganda by providing targeted resources to areas with high rates of unmarried mothers and those areas with high rates of Luganda as their language of choice.

Introduction: To investigate the spatiotemporal evolution of agricultural carbon emissions and carbon absorption, analyse the spatiotemporal variations in the carbon balance, delineate carbon-offsetting regions, and formulate low-carbon development strategies tailored to various major functional zones, this study aims to promote coordinated regional ecological and environmental governance. Methods: This study takes a perspective based on major functional zones, focuses on 17 cities in Hubei Province, studies the spatiotemporal variations in agricultural carbon budgets and carbon offsets in each city from the perspective of functional zoning and proposes a spatial optimization scheme for reducing carbon emissions. Results and discussion: The results show that both agricultural carbon emissions and carbon absorption in Hubei Province gradually increased, although the agricultural carbon budgets varied significantly among cities. Arable lands were the main agricultural carbon sinks in Hubei Province. Overall, carbon emissions exhibited declining core–periphery zonation, with Xiangyang, Jingzhou, and Huanggang serving as the centre (high emissions) and the cities of Shennongjia, Enshi, and Yichang serving as the periphery (low emissions). Carbon absorption displayed a U-shaped distribution, with high values in the east, south, and west and low values in the centre and north. The cities of Yichang, Jingmen, and Huanggang were the peak carbon sink areas. In recent years, the coordination between the agricultural carbon emissions and carbon budgets in Hubei Province has gradually improved, and agricultural carbon absorption and emissions have become increasingly balanced. Seven carbon-positive, five carbon-neutral, and five carbon-negative areas were identified in the province. Based on these findings, differentiated carbon emission reduction strategies were proposed to promote coordinated and low-carbon agriculture.

Incident data, a form of big data frequently used in urban studies, are characterised by point features with high spatial and temporal resolution and categorical values. In contrast to panel data, such spatial data pooled over time reflect multi-directional spatial effects but only unidirectional temporal effects, which are challenging to analyse. This paper presents an innovative approach to address this challenge – a geographically and temporally weighted co-location quotient which includes global and local computation, a method to calculate a spatiotemporal weight matrix and a significance test using Monte Carlo simulation. This new approach is used to identify spatio-temporal crime patterns across Greater Manchester in 2016 from open source recorded crime data. The results show that this approach is suitable for the analysis and visualisation of spatio-temporal dependence and heterogeneity in categorical spatial data pooled over time. It is particularly useful for detecting symmetrical spatio-temporal co-location patterns and mapping local clusters. The method also addresses the unbalanced temporal scale problem caused by unidirectional temporal data representation and explores potential impacts. The empirical evidence of the spatiotemporal crime patterns might usefully be deployed to inform the development of criminological theory by helping to disentangle the relationships between crime and the urban environment.

Tourism-led economic growth and tourism-driven urbanization have attracted increasing attention by provinces and regions in China with abundant tourism resources. Due to low data availability, the current tourism literature lacks empirical evidence of the tourism network in less-developed mountainous regions where the development of transport infrastructure is more variable. This paper aims to provide such evidence using Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in China as a case study. Using User Generated Content (UGC) data, this study constructs a tourism network in Guangxi. By integrating social network analysis with spatial interaction modelling, we compared the impact of two different transport infrastructures, highway and high-speed railway, on tourist flows, particularly in less-developed mountainous regions. It was found that the product of node centrality and flow could best describe the significant pushing and pulling forces on the flow of tourists. The tourism by high-speed railway was sensitive to the position of trip destination on the whole tourism network but self-drive tourism was more sensitive to travelling time. The increase of high-speed railway density is crucial to promote local tourism-led economic development, however, large-scale karst landforms in the study area present a significant obstacle to the construction of high-speed railways.

The total factor carbon emission performance has been largely used to investigate the effectiveness of climate policies and to support the design of carbon reduction strategies. Despite the important information that this indicator is providing in relation to historical and cross-country trends, no previous studies have been specifically devoted to analyse the persistent and the transient components of the total factor carbon emission performance. By disaggregating the time-variant and the time-invariant elements of the carbon dioxide emission changes, this paper adopts, for the first time, a new methodological approach to decompose the components of the total factor carbon emission performance indicator. Using panel data for selected 30 Chinese provinces for the time-period 1997-2017, this paper combines the environmental production technology, the Shephard distance function, and the stochastic frontier models to measure and investigate the spatio-temporal evolution of the total factor carbon emission performance and to evaluate the effectiveness of Chinese policies. By providing a better understanding of the main drivers of carbon dioxide emission changes, the proposed methodology, is suitable to be replicated across regions and countries, and provides an important opportunity for international comparisons and for the design of coordinated carbon reduction strategies.

Understanding the health-related quality of life (HrQoL) of hospitalized COVID-19 survivors is an emerging global challenge arising from the current pandemic. A qualitative study of the experiences of sixteen hospitalized COVID-19 survivors from Nanning City, China, was conducted using semi-structured telephone interviews in May 2020. These first-hand accounts were critically and empirically analysed to identify emerging health and social issues, and provide potential solutions to improve survivors’ quality of life. This in-depth, qualitative study of HrQoL for hospitalized COVID-19 survivors provides the first empirical evidence and conceptual framework with eight dimensions (physical symptoms, anxiety, trauma, economic loss, place-based identity, self-stigma, health self-interventions, and changing lifestyle) for understanding the physiological, psychological, socio-economic and health behavioral aspects of their daily lives. We argue that local and global governments should provide integrated healthcare, social and digital infrastructure to support this vulnerable group. More comparative and multi-disciplinary studies in this area are needed to generate academic standards of assessing health-related quality of life and produce good practice guidelines for promoting urban resilience in response to public health disasters.

The ongoing pandemic has led to more than 100 million of confirmed cases and 2.16 million deaths of people globally (up to late January 2021). A variety of health and well-being issues resulting from the largest scale lockdown in the 21st century have addressed emerging global challenges for urban sustainability and smart city development: how to creatively design local neighbourhood and home in response to changing lifestyles? How to smartly design digital and social infrastructure to support individual adaption to changed life-styles? How urban governance and smart city deal with a variety of social, spatial and information inequalities? The multi-disciplinary and international discussion and debates on these timely questions help rethink the planning and governance of healthy city in the uncertain contexts.

Based on the authors’ personal experiences, this commentary discusses contrasting urban contexts and lockdown measures in twinned cities Wuhan, China and Manchester, UK, to examine spatial reach under COVID-19 restrictions in both places. Focusing on latency, the capacity of space to fit new occupation patterns and uses, the role of architecture and urban design is considered, to identify lessons applicable to physical and digital environment design, in scales and media that can absorb shock, supporting flexible, creative resilient approaches and patterns of future liveability. With massive externally induced change, what stays, what shifts, what disappears? This paper considers spatial adaptability, spatial resilience in two comparative, yet different contexts to identify design-based questions and propose thematic responses addressing resilient liveable future urbanism. This reflects on the similarities and differences between lockdown in China and the UK, the concept of mental as well as physical lockdown and how this has played out in these two countries.