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The digital economy may accelerate the upgrading of industrial structures and boost regional innovation output, effectively contributing to China's green economic transformation. The impact of the digital economy on developing the urban green economy is analyzed using data from 280 cities across China from 2010-2019. Using a fixed-effects model and the Spatial Durbin model, the digital economy is found to have a significant impact on urban green economy development. This result is shown to be robust to various factors. There is significant regional variability in the impact of the digital economy on green economic growth, with the strongest impact in the northeast, followed by the central and western regions. Meanwhile, non-resource-based cities and policy pilot cities have a more pronounced role in promoting the digital economy. The intermediate transmission chain of industrial structural upgrading and regional innovation output fosters the growth of the urban green economy via the digital economy. Regional innovation production is responsible for 30.848% of this growth, with the intermediate effect of industrial structural upgrading contributing to 38.155%., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Wenqi Liao. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Based on the China City Commercial Credit Environment Index (CEI), a more scientific spatial DID model was used to examine the long-term impact of the opening of ports and trading in the late Qing Dynasty on the urban commercial credit environment, taking cities above the prefecture level in the Yangtze River Delta as a sample. The study confirms that: (1) the opening of ports and commerce in the late Qing Dynasty had a significant contribution to the urban commercial credit environment, which was conducive to the transformation of production methods and interpersonal relationships from traditional to modern, and to the improvement of the urban commercial credit environment. (2) Before the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the local forces of the late Qing Dynasty were resistant to the economic aggression of the Great Powers, and the positive impact of the opening of ports and trading on the commercial credit environment of port cities was more significant, but the impact was not obvious after the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. (3) From the history of the opening of ports for trade in the late Qing Dynasty, the economic aggression of the Western powers against the non-patronage areas by means of the buying class objectively strengthened the concept of rule of law and credit awareness in the local market and exerted a long-term influence on the commercial credit environment of the cities, but the impact of the opening of ports for trade on the commercial credit environment of the patronage areas was not prominent. (4) Cities located in the sphere of influence of the common law powers had a more pronounced impact on the commercial credit environment as their institutions and concepts were more easily transplanted, while the impact of the opening of ports and trading on the commercial credit environment of cities in the sphere of influence of the civil law powers was not significant. Policy Insights: (1) Enhance the ability to negotiate with foreign countries on economic and trade matters from a level-headed world perspective, and be bold and adept at fighting unreasonable rules, standards and requirements in order to better optimise the business credit environment; (2) Regulate the use of administrative resources and avoid undue administrative intervention, which is an important prerequisite for improving the basic system of the market economy to enhance the business credit environment; (3) Emphasise both connotative development to follow a Chinese style modernisation path, and (3) emphasising selective cooperation to promote outward development, promoting the interaction, convergence and matching of domestic and foreign regulations, and continuously improving the regional commercial credit environment., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

As a new economic form, the digital economy is not only empowering new impetus to economic growth, but also reshaping specific business forms of economical operation. Therefore, we conducted an empirical test to verify the impact and mechanism of pollution reduction in the digital economy, based on the panel data of 280 prefecture-level cities in China from 2011 to 2019. The results show that, first the development of the digital economy indeed has the positive effect of realizing pollution reduction. The results of mediating effect test indicate the influence mechanism mainly rely on promoting the upgrading of industrial structure (structural effect) and upgrading the level of green technology innovation (technical effect). Second, the results of regional heterogeneity analysis show that the emission reduction effect of digital economy development on four pollutants is characterized by weakness in the east and strong in the west in regional distribution. Third, the development of digital economy has a threshold effect on the level of economic development to achieve its pollution reduction effect. Further identification of the threshold effect indicates that the higher the level of economic development, the better in emission reduction effect., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

As an important financial means for governments to improve the quality of economic development, government debt greatly affects the quality of local environmental governance. Based on a theoretical mechanism analysis that uses the pollutant emissions panel data and new caliber urban investment bond data of 273 cities in China, this paper empirically tests the impact of local government debt on urban emission reduction and the mechanism that drives this impact. We find that local government debt significantly promotes urban emissions reduction, and as urban pollution becomes more aggravated, this promoting effect has a dynamic path, first strengthening and then weakening. The role of local government debt in promoting urban emission reduction is characterized by both temporal and spatial heterogeneity. A mechanistic analysis shows that local government debt can promote urban emission reduction by promoting urban environmental innovation, with green invention patents demonstrating a stronger intermediary role than green utility model patents., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Geographic accessibility plays a key role in health care inequality but remains insufficiently investigated in China, primarily due to the lack of accurate, broad-coverage data on supply and demand. In this paper, we employ an innovative approach to local supply-and-demand conditions to (1) reveal the status quo of the distribution of health care provision and (2) examine whether individual households from communities with different housing prices can acquire equal and adequate quality health care services within and across 361 cities in China. Our findings support previous conclusions that quality hospitals are concentrated in cities with high administrative rankings and developmental levels. However, after accounting for the population size an "accessible" hospital serves, we discern "pro-poor" inequality in accessibility to care (denoted as GAPSD) and that GAPSD decreases along with increases in administrative rankings of cities and in community ratings. This paper is significant for both research and policy-making. Our approach successfully reveals an "unexpected" pattern of health care inequality that has not been reported before, and our findings provide a nationwide, detailed benchmark that facilitates the assessment of health and urban policies, as well as associated policy-making., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Aim: To report revolutionary reorganization of academic gastroenterology division from COVID-19 pandemic surge at metropolitan Detroit epicenter from 0 infected patients on March 9, 2020, to > 300 infected patients in hospital census in April 2020 and > 200 infected patients in April 2021., Setting: GI Division, William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, has 36 GI clinical faculty; performs > 23,000 endoscopies annually; fully accredited GI fellowship since 1973; employs > 400 house staff annually since 1995; tertiary academic hospital; predominantly voluntary attendings; and primary teaching hospital, Oakland-University-Medical-School., Methods: This was a prospective study. Expert opinion. Personal experience includes Hospital GI chief > 14 years until 2020; GI fellowship program director, several hospitals > 20 years; author of > 300 publications in peer-reviewed GI journals; committee-member, Food-and-Drug-Administration-GI-Advisory Committee > 5 years; and key hospital/medical school committee memberships. Computerized PubMed literature review was performed on hospital changes and pandemic. Study was exempted/approved by Hospital IRB, April 14, 2020., Results: Division reorganized patient care to add clinical capacity and minimize risks to staff of contracting COVID-19 infection. Affiliated medical school changes included: changing "live" to virtual lectures; canceling medical student GI electives; exempting medical students from treating COVID-19-infected patients; and graduating medical students on time despite partly missing clinical electives. Division was reorganized by changing "live" GI lectures to virtual lectures; four GI fellows temporarily reassigned as medical attendings supervising COVID-19-infected patients; temporarily mandated intubation of COVID-19-infected patients for esophagogastroduodenoscopy; postponing elective GI endoscopies; and reducing average number of endoscopies from 100 to 4 per weekday during pandemic peak! GI clinic visits reduced by half (postponing non-urgent visits), and physical visits replaced by virtual visits. Economic pandemic impact included temporary, hospital deficit subsequently relieved by federal grants; hospital employee terminations/furloughs; and severe temporary decline in GI practitioner's income during surge. Hospital temporarily enhanced security and gradually ameliorated facemask shortage. GI program director contacted GI fellows twice weekly to ameliorate pandemic-induced stress. Divisional parties held virtually. GI fellowship applicants interviewed virtually. Graduate medical education changes included weekly committee meetings to monitor pandemic-induced changes; program managers working from home; canceling ACGME annual fellowship survey, changing ACGME physical to virtual site visits; and changing national conventions from physical to virtual., Conclusion: Reports profound and pervasive GI divisional changes to maximize clinical resources devoted to COVID-19-infected patients and minimize risks of transmitting infection., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

To build better theories of cities, companies, and other social institutions such as universities, requires that we understand the tradeoffs and complementarities that exist between their core functions, and that we understand bounds to their growth. Scaling theory has been a powerful tool for addressing such questions in diverse physical, biological and urban systems, revealing systematic quantitative regularities between size and function. Here we apply scaling theory to the social sciences, taking a synoptic view of an entire class of institutions. The United States higher education system serves as an ideal case study, since it includes over 5,800 institutions with shared broad objectives, but ranges in strategy from vocational training to the production of novel research, contains public, nonprofit and for-profit models, and spans sizes from 10 to roughly 100,000 enrolled students. We show that, like organisms, ecosystems and cities, universities and colleges scale in a surprisingly systematic fashion following simple power-law behavior. Comparing seven commonly accepted sectors of higher education organizations, we find distinct regimes of scaling between a school's total enrollment and its expenditures, revenues, graduation rates and economic added value. Our results quantify how each sector leverages specific economies of scale to address distinct priorities. Taken together, the scaling of features within a sector along with the shifts in scaling across sectors implies that there are generic mechanisms and constraints shared by all sectors, which lead to tradeoffs between their different societal functions and roles. We highlight the strong complementarity between public and private research universities, and community and state colleges, that all display superlinear returns to scale. In contrast to the scaling of biological systems, our results highlight that much of the observed scaling behavior is modulated by the particular strategies of organizations rather than an immutable set of constraints., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Natural resources are scarce in the Loess Plateau, and the ecological environment is fragile. Sustainable development requires special attention to resource and environmental carrying capacity (RECC). This study selected 24 representative cities in five natural areas of the Loess Plateau; used the entropy-weight-based TOPSIS method to evaluate and analyze the RECC of each city and region from 2013 to 2018; established a diagnosis model to identify the obstacle factors restricting the improvement of RECC; and constructed the theoretical framework of the RECC system mechanism. The results show that the RECC of the Loess Plateau is increasing in general but is relatively small. The environmental and social subsystems have the highest and lowest carrying capacities, respectively. There is an evident contradiction between economic development and the environment. Population density, investment in technological innovation, per capita sown area, and per capita water resources are the main obstacles affecting the improvement of RECC in the Loess Plateau. Such evaluations and diagnoses can support ecological civilization and sustainable development., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Globally, the influx of refugee, migrant, and immigrant populations into small centers of industrialized agriculture has called attention to a looming public health crisis. As small towns shift from remote villages into rural, agri-industrial centers, they offer limited access to amenities needed to support human well-being. Our study focused on three Iowa towns that continue to experience an increase in under-represented minority populations and decline of majority populations as a proxy for studying shifting populations in an era of industrialized agriculture and global capital. We aimed to understand the socioecological impact of built environments-outdoor locations where people live and work-and likelihood of environmental exposures to impact vulnerable populations. Urban socioecological measures tend to present contradictory results in small towns due to their reliance on density and proximity. To compensate, we used post-occupancy evaluations (POE) to examine built environments for evidence of access to environmental design criteria to support healthy behaviors. The study systematically identified 44 locations on transects across three small towns to employ a 62 item POE and assess multiple environmental criteria to crosscut design with environmental health disparities. Principal-components factor analysis identified two distinct significant components for environmental risk and population vulnerability, supporting similar studies on parallel communities. Multilevel modeling found a divergence between supportive environmental design coupled with an increase environmental risk due to location. The combined effect likely contributes to environmental health disparities. The study provides a strategy for auditing small town built environments as well as insight into achieving equity., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interest exist.

Severe and persistent mental illnesses are frequently associated with homelessness and extensive use of public services. Cost savings after the provision of permanent supportive housing (PSH) have been examined in large metropolitan areas but not in medium-sized communities. Administrative and clinical data were collected to determine use of public services, such as use of emergency services, inpatient psychiatric and medical services, and correctional facilities, in the year preceding and the year subsequent to placement in PSH. Costs of the housing and the utilized services were also calculated. Ninety-one subjects were in housing first (HF) programs and 19 were in treatment first (TF) programs. Overall there was a net cost savings of over $1.2 million or $6134/consumer/year of PSH. Nearly all cost savings were in reduced service utilization which implies prevention of both medical and psychiatric morbidity. In HF the average per patient cost savings ($21,082.12) was not significantly greater than TF ($12,907.29; p = 0.33). Provision of PSH in a mid-sized city provides significant cost savings.

We propose a dedicated research effort on the determinants of settlement persistence in the ancient world, with the potential to significantly advance the scientific understanding of urban sustainability today. Settlements (cities, towns, villages) are locations with two key attributes: They frame human interactions and activities in space, and they are where people dwell or live. Sustainability, in this case, focuses on the capacity of structures and functions of a settlement system (geography, demography, institutions) to provide for continuity of safe habitation. The 7,000-y-old experience of urbanism, as revealed by archaeology and history, includes many instances of settlements and settlement systems enduring, adapting to, or generating environmental, institutional, and technological changes. The field of urban sustainability lacks a firm scientific foundation for understanding the long durée, relying instead on narratives of collapse informed by limited case studies. We argue for the development of a new interdisciplinary research effort to establish scientific understanding of settlement and settlement system persistence. Such an effort would build upon the many fields that study human settlements to develop new theories and databases from the extensive documentation of ancient and premodern urban systems. A scientific foundation will generate novel insights to advance the field of urban sustainability., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest.

Urban tree cover provides benefits to human health and well-being, but previous studies suggest that tree cover is often inequitably distributed. Here, we use National Agriculture Imagery Program digital ortho photographs to survey the tree cover inequality for Census blocks in US large urbanized areas, home to 167 million people across 5,723 municipalities and other Census-designated places. We compared tree cover to summer land surface temperature, as measured using Landsat imagery. In 92% of the urbanized areas surveyed, low-income blocks have less tree cover than high-income blocks. On average, low-income blocks have 15.2% less tree cover and are 1.5⁰C hotter than high-income blocks. The greatest difference between low- and high-income blocks was found in urbanized areas in the Northeast of the United States, where low-income blocks in some urbanized areas have 30% less tree cover and are 4.0⁰C hotter. Even after controlling for population density and built-up intensity, the positive association between income and tree cover is significant, as is the positive association between proportion non-Hispanic white and tree cover. We estimate, after controlling for population density, that low-income blocks have 62 million fewer trees than high-income blocks, equal to a compensatory value of $56 billion ($1,349/person). An investment in tree planting and natural regeneration of $17.6 billion would be needed to close the tree cover disparity, benefitting 42 million people in low-income blocks., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Understanding the dynamics by which urban areas attract visitors is important in today's cities that are continuously increasing in population towards higher densities. Identifying services that relate to highly attractive districts is useful to make policies regarding the placement of such places. Thus, we present a framework for classifying districts in cities by their attractiveness to daily commuters and relating Points of Interests (POIs) types to districts' attraction patterns. We used Origin-Destination matrices (ODs) mined from cell phone data that capture the flow of trips between each pair of places in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. We define the attraction profile for a place based on three main statistical features: The number of visitors a place received, the distribution of distance traveled by visitors on the road network, and the spatial spread of locations from where trips started. We used a hierarchical clustering algorithm to classify all places in the city by their features of attraction. We discovered three main types of Urban Attractors in Riyadh during the morning period: Global, which are significant places in the city, Downtown, which contains the central business district, and Residential attractors. In addition, we uncovered what makes districts possess certain attraction patterns. We used a statistical significance testing approach to quantify the relationship between Points of Interests (POIs) types (services) and the patterns of Urban Attractors detected., Competing Interests: We declare that Author Marta Gonzalez is a guest editor for the PLOS ONE call for papers on Cities as Complex Systems. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

This study aims to explore the freight demand network spatial patterns in six provinces of central China from the perspective of the spread of the epidemic and the freight imbalance and breakout. To achieve this purpose, the big data of "cart search" demand information provided by small and medium freight enterprises on the freight information platform are analyzed. 343,690 pieces of freight demand big data on the freight information platform and Python, ArcGIS, UCINET, and Gephi software are used. The results show that: (1) The choke-point of unbalanced freight demand network is Wuhan, and the secondary choke-points are Hefei and Zhengzhou. (2) In southern China, a chain reaction circle of freight imbalance is formed with Wuhan, Hefei, and Nanchang as the centers. In northern China, a chain reaction circle of freight imbalance is formed with Zhengzhou and Taiyuan as the centers. (3) The freight demand of the six provinces in central China exhibits typical characteristics of long tail distribution with large span and unbalanced distribution. (4) The import and export of freight in different cities vary greatly, and the distribution is unbalanced. This study indicates the imbalance difference, chain reaction, keys and hidden troubles posed by the freight demand network. From the perspectives of freight transfer breakout, freight balance breakout, freight strength breakout, and breakout of freight periphery cities, we propose solutions to breakouts in the freight market in six provinces of central China in the post-epidemic era., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Ethnic and gendered employment gaps are mainly explained by individual characteristics, while less attention is paid to occupational structures. Drawing on administrative data, this article analyses the impact of occupational characteristics on top of individual attributes in the urban labour market of Vienna. Both set of variables can explain observed employment gaps to a large extent, but persistent gaps remain, in particular among females. The article's main finding is that the occupational structure appears to have gendered effects. While men tend to benefit from ethnic segregation, women face difficulties when looking for jobs with high shares of immigrant workers. Looking for jobs in occupations that recruit from relatively few educational backgrounds (credentials) is beneficial for both sexes at the outset unemployment, but among females this competitive advantage diminishes over time. The article concludes by discussing potential strategies to avoid the traps of occupational segregation., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Entrepreneurship activity varies significantly across cities. We use the novel data for 1,652 ecosystem actors across sixteen cities in nine developing and transition economies during 2018-2019 to examine the role that institutional context plays in facilitating the productive entrepreneurship and reducing the unproductive entrepreneurship. This study is the first to develop and test a model of multi-dimensional institutional arrangements in cities. It demonstrates that not just that institutions matter in shaping the entrepreneurship ecosystem in cities, but in particular those institutional arrangements enhancing the productive and reducing unproductive entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest that differences between normative, cognitive, and regulatory pillars are associated with variance in both types of entrepreneurship in cities. For the formation of productive and high-growth entrepreneurs, all three pillars of institutional arrangement matter. For unproductive entrepreneurship normative pillar of institutions and the role of civil society matter most. This study has theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurship ecosystem policy in cities., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

We analyze the trade-offs between health and the economy during the period of social distancing in São Paulo, the state hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. We use longitudinal data with municipal-level information and check the robustness of our estimates to several sources of bias, including spatial dependence, reverse causality, and time-variant omitted variables. We use exogenous climate shocks as instruments for social distancing since people are more likely to stay home in wetter and colder periods. Our findings suggest that the health benefits of social distancing differ by levels of municipal development and may have vanished if the COVID-19 spread was not controlled in neighboring municipalities. In turn, we did not find evidence that municipalities with tougher social distancing performed worse economically. Our results also highlight that estimates that do not account for endogeneity may largely underestimate the benefits of social distancing on reducing the spread of COVID-19., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Urban scaling and Zipf's law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated independently and are often perceived as disassociated matters. Here we present a large scale investigation about the connection between these two laws using population and GDP data from almost five thousand consistently-defined cities in 96 countries. We empirically demonstrate that both laws are tied to each other and derive an expression relating the urban scaling and Zipf exponents. This expression captures the average tendency of the empirical relation between both exponents, and simulations yield very similar results to the real data after accounting for random variations. We find that while the vast majority of countries exhibit increasing returns to scale of urban GDP, this effect is less pronounced in countries with fewer small cities and more metropolises (small Zipf exponent) than in countries with a more uneven number of small and large cities (large Zipf exponent). Our research puts forward the idea that urban scaling does not solely emerge from intra-city processes, as population distribution and scaling of urban GDP are correlated to each other., Competing Interests: Haroldo Ribeiro is an Academic Editor for PLOS ONE and Diego Rybski is a guest editor for the PLOS ONE call for papers on Cities as Complex Systems does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Based on the data of 812 small towns in Chongqing, China, this paper attempts to conduct an empirical analysis on whether tourist towns with excellent natural environment, policy advantage, and market preference are more ecologically livable than ordinary small towns. It is found that as a whole, tourist towns are indeed more ecologically livable than ordinary small towns. Also, from the perspective of grading, both the national and provincial tourist towns have the advantage of ecological livability, but the advantage of national ones is more prominent. Furthermore, the ecological livability of tourist towns is affected by location advantage and policy inclination. The implications of the results are discussed following the outcomes of the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak. The suggestions beyond the coronavirus disease 2019 are also provided., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2020 Su and Zhou.)

Understanding cities as complex systems, sustainable urban planning depends on reliable high-resolution data, for example of the building stock to upscale region-wide retrofit policies. For some cities and regions, these data exist in detailed 3D models based on real-world measurements. However, they are still expensive to build and maintain, a significant challenge, especially for small and medium-sized cities that are home to the majority of the European population. New methods are needed to estimate relevant building stock characteristics reliably and cost-effectively. Here, we present a machine learning based method for predicting building heights, which is based only on open-access geospatial data on urban form, such as building footprints and street networks. The method allows to predict building heights for regions where no dedicated 3D models exist currently. We train our model using building data from four European countries (France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany) and find that the morphology of the urban fabric surrounding a given building is highly predictive of the height of the building. A test on the German state of Brandenburg shows that our model predicts building heights with an average error well below the typical floor height (about 2.5 m), without having access to training data from Germany. Furthermore, we show that even a small amount of local height data obtained by citizens substantially improves the prediction accuracy. Our results illustrate the possibility of predicting missing data on urban infrastructure; they also underline the value of open government data and volunteered geographic information for scientific applications, such as contextual but scalable strategies to mitigate climate change., Competing Interests: D.d.B.S and F.A are employed by the commercial company Nam.R. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Analyses of urban scaling laws assume that observations in different cities are independent of the existence of nearby cities. Here we introduce generative models and data-analysis methods that overcome this limitation by modelling explicitly the effect of interactions between individuals at different locations. Parameters that describe the scaling law and the spatial interactions are inferred from data simultaneously, allowing for rigorous (Bayesian) model comparison and overcoming the problem of defining the boundaries of urban regions. Results in five different datasets show that including spatial interactions typically leads to better models and a change in the exponent of the scaling law., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

We investigate socio-economic urban scaling behavior of municipalities in Denmark, the Netherlands, and in particular in Germany. Our interest is twofold. First we investigate whether, and to what extent, scaling occurs in various types of urban areas. The second important topic of research concerns the comparison of specific types of urban areas with regard to the values of the gross urban product. This is a new approach: two scaling systems are compared not only in terms of the scaling exponent, but also in terms of the differences in the gross urban product. We are specifically interested in the role of urban governance in terms of local urban government structures. Germany is our central case because it works as a natural experiment: a large number of urban areas is one-governance, but others are not. More specifically, we distinguish between cities of which the surrounding urban area belongs to the municipality of the city (kreisfreie cities), and those specific districts (Kreise) which are urban areas consisting of several municipalities. Our findings suggest that urban areas with one municipality perform better than urban areas with fragmented governance structures. We also investigate the relation between scaling of Kreise and simple measures of centrality, including the Zipf-distribution. A strong relation is found between the measured residuals of the scaling equations and the socio-economic position of cities assessed with a set of different socio-economic indicators. Given the debate on the effectiveness of municipal reform, our results may lead to challenging conclusions about the importance of one-municipality instead of multi-municipality governance in urban areas. These results are relevant for policy as they suggest that there is a benefit to unifying the governance structure of compact urban agglomerations., Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

This study's objective is to estimate the effects of corruption in the public health sector on the economic growth of Brazilian municipalities. To build three corruption measures, data from audits conducted by the office of the comptroller general (Controladoria Geral da Uniao, CGU henceforth) in 2009 and 2010 in the health and sanitation sectors were used. Two analysis steps were performed. The first verified the relationship between the performance of the audit and the economic growth rate of the municipalities, using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS); the second analyses the effects of corruption on public health on the economic growth of the audited municipalities, using OLS and Quantile Regressions. First, in a sample of 5547 municipalities, the evidence indicates that being audited is related to slower economic growth. From this, when the sample is restricted to the 180 municipalities audited in 2009 and the corruption variables constructed from the audit reports conducted in the year, the results indicate negative effects of corruption on economic growth. The results show that in the larger quantiles of economic growth, the adverse effects of corruption are felt more significantly. Both methods tested with the three corruption variables created provide similar evidence, showing robustness of results. Therefore, the study allowed us to conclude that corruption in the public health sector hampered the economic growth of Brazilian municipalities, which is a delayed effect: Corruption in 2009 had negative effects on growth in 2011.

New urbanization is the fundamental approach to achieve the healthy, stable, and sustainable development of the Chinese economic society. It is also the basic outlet to eliminate the "dual economic structure" in urban and rural areas. Based on the connotation of new urbanization, we constructed an evaluation system using population development, economic development, quality of life, infrastructure, resources and environment, and urban and rural harmonious development. The entropy and weighted summation methods were used to measure the level of new urbanization for 11 provincial capital cities from 2005 to 2018, and policy implications were analyzed correspondingly. The results show that there are significant differences in the development levels of new urbanization in these cities, with infrastructure construction being the primary driver. These developments have placed the economy and environment under great pressure. The quality of urban life and the level of infrastructure construction need to be improved because of the expanding economic gap between urban and rural areas. These cities with poor internal coordination also have apparent differences amongst individual factors. Overall, the policies on these factors play a positive role in the process of new urbanization. In the future, provincial capital cities need to consider the weak links and provide more focus on employment and education., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Does the scaling relationship between population sizes of cities with urban metrics like economic output and infrastructure (transversal scaling) mirror the evolution of individual cities in time (longitudinal scaling)? The answer to this question has important policy implications, but the lack of suitable data has so far hindered rigorous empirical tests. In this paper, we advance the debate by looking at the evolution of two urban variables, GDP and water network length, for over 5500 cities in Brazil. We find that longitudinal scaling exponents are city-specific. However, they are distributed around an average value that approaches the transversal scaling exponent provided that the data is decomposed to eliminate external factors, and only for cities with a sufficiently high growth rate. We also introduce a mathematical framework that connects the microscopic level to global behaviour, finding good agreement between theoretical predictions and empirical evidence in all analyzed cases. Our results add complexity to the idea that the longitudinal dynamics is a micro-scaling version of the transversal dynamics of the entire urban system. The longitudinal analysis can reveal differences in scaling behavior related to population size and nature of urban variables. Our approach also makes room for the role of external factors such as public policies and development, and opens up new possibilities in the research of the effects of scaling and contextual factors., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Objective: To verify if the Melhor em Casa program can actually reduce hospitalization costs., Methods: We use as an empirical strategy a Regression Discontinuity Design, which reduces endogeneity problems of our model. We also performed tests of heterogeneous responses and robustness. Data on the dependent variable, namely hospitalization costs, were collected in the Department of Informatics of the Unified Health System (DATASUS), using the microdata set from the Hospital Admissions System of the Unified Health System (SUS) from 2010 to 2013, totaling 3,609,384 observations. The covariates or control variables used were age and costs with patients in the intensive care unit, also from DATASUS., Results: The results point out that the Melhor em Casa program effectively reduced hospitalization costs by approximately 4.7% in 2011, 5.8% in 2012 and 10.2% in 2013., Conclusions: Based on the analyses, we observed that maintaining the program can effectively improve the management of public resources, since it reduced the hospitalization costs in the three years studied. The program reduced hospitalization costs of risk groups and also in situations that usually increase hospital costs such as lack of equipment and elective hospitalizations. Thus, it can be affirmed that the program can reduce hospitalization costs, especially in risk and more vulnerable groups, showing efficiency as a public policy.

Objective: Qualitative methods may help to understand features related to health urban inequalities as a way to include citizens' perceptions of their neighbourhoods in relation to their health-related behaviours. The aim of this article is to describe the methods and design of a qualitative urban health study., Methods: The Heart Healthy Hoods (HHH) analyses cardiovascular health in an urban environment using mixed methods: electronic health records, quantitative individual questionnaires, physical examination, semi-structured Interviews (SSIs), focus groups (FGs) and participatory technics such as photovoice. This article focuses on the HHH qualitative methods and design. A case study was used to select three neighbourhoods in Madrid with different socioeconomic levels: low, medium, and high. The selection process for these three neighbourhoods was as follows: classification of all Madrid's neighbourhoods (128) according to their socioeconomic level; after ranking this classification, nine neighbourhoods, three by socioeconomic level, were short-listed; different urban sociology criteria and non-participant observation were used for the final selection of three neighbourhoods. After selecting the three neighbourhoods, thirty SSIs were held with residents and six SSIs were held with key informants. Finally, twenty-nine FGs will be conducted over the course of 8 months, between May and December of 2018., Conclusions: Systematization in the selection of neighbourhoods and the use of adequate techniques are essential for the qualitative study of urban health inequalities., (Copyright © 2018 SESPAS. Publicado por Elsevier España, S.L.U. All rights reserved.)

Background: This review examines the human health impact of climate change in China. Through reviewing available research findings under four major climate change phenomena, namely extreme temperature, altered rainfall pattern, rise of sea level and extreme weather events, relevant implications for other middle-income population with similar contexts will be synthesized., Sources of Data: Sources of data included bilingual peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2018 in PubMed, Google Scholar and China Academic Journals Full-text Database., Areas of Agreement: The impact of temperature on mortality outcomes was the most extensively studied, with the strongest cause-specific mortality risks between temperature and cardiovascular and respiratory mortality. The geographical focuses of the studies indicated variations in health risks and impacts of different climate change phenomena across the country., Areas of Controversy: While rainfall-related studies predominantly focus on its impact on infectious and vector-borne diseases, consistent associations were not often found., Growing Points: Mental health outcomes of climate change had been gaining increasing attention, particularly in the context of extreme weather events. The number of projection studies on the long-term impact had been growing., Areas Timely for Developing Research: The lack of studies on the health implications of rising sea levels and on comorbidity and injury outcomes warrants immediate attention. Evidence is needed to understand health impacts on vulnerable populations living in growing urbanized cities and urban enclaves, in particular migrant workers. Location-specific climate-health outcome thresholds (such as temperature-mortality threshold) will be needed to support evidence-based clinical management plans and health impact mitigation strategies to protect vulnerable communities., (© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Objective: Cardiac arrest (CA) is considered a major public health issue. Few studies have focused on geographic variations in incidence and socioeconomic characteristics. The aim of this study is to identify clusters of municipalities with high or low CA incidence, and find socioeconomic factors associated with them., Patients and Methods: CA data from three Parisian counties, representing 123 municipalities, were extracted from the French CA registry. Socioeconomic data for each municipality were collected from the French national institute of statistics. We used a statistical approach combining Bayesian methods to study geographical CA incidence variations, and scan statistics, to identify CA incidence clusters of municipalities. Finally, we compared clusters of municipalities in terms of socioeconomic factors., Results: Strong geographical variations were found among 123 municipalities: 34 presented a significantly increased risk of incidence and 37 presented a significantly low risk. Scan statistics identified seven significant spatial clusters of CA incidence, including three clusters with low incidence (the relative risk varied from 0.23 to 0.54) and four clusters with high incidence (the relative risk varied from 1.43 to 2). Clusters of municipalities with a high CA incidence are characterized by a lower socioeconomic status than the others (low and normal CA incidence clusters). Analysis showed a statistically significant relationship between social deprivation factors and high incidence., Conclusion: This study shows strong geographical variations in CA incidence and a statistically significant relationship between over-incidence and social deprivation variables.

Objectives: To estimate avoidable mortality, potential years of life lost and economic costs associated with particulate matter PM 2.5 exposure for 2 years (2013 and 2015) in Mexico using two scenarios of reduced concentrations (i.e., mean annual PM 2.5 concentration < 12 µg/m 3 and mean annual PM 2.5 concentration < 10 µg/m 3 )., Methods: The health impact assessment method was followed. This method consists of: identification of health effects, selection of concentration-response functions, estimation of exposure, quantification of impacts quantification and economic assessment using the willingness to pay and human capital approaches., Results: For 2013, we included data from 62 monitoring sites in ten cities, (113 municipalities) where 36,486,201 live. In 2015, we included 71 monitoring sites from fifteen cities (121 municipalities) and 40,479,629 inhabitants. It was observed that reduction in the annual PM 2.5 average to 10 μg/would have prevented 14,666 deaths and 150,771 potential years of life lost in 2015, with estimated costs of 64,164 and 5434 million dollars, respectively., Conclusions: Reducing PM 2.5 concentration in the Mexican cities studied would reduce mortality by all causes by 8.1%, representing important public health benefits.

Purpose: There is a growing awareness of the economic and contextual factors that may play a role in the aetiology of suicide. The Programa Bolsa Família (PBF) the Brazilian conditional cash transfer programme, established in 2004, aims to attenuate the effects of poverty of Brazilians. Our study aims to evaluate the effect of Bolsa Família Programme (BFP) coverage on suicide rates in Brazilian municipalities., Methods: We conducted an ecological study using 2004-2012 panel data for 5507 Brazilian municipalities. We calculated age-standardized suicide rates for each municipality and year. BFP coverage was categorized according to three levels (< 30%, ≥ 30% and < 70% and ≥ 70%) and duration (coverage ≤ 70% for all years, ≥ 70% for 1 year, ≥ 70% for 2 years, ≥ 70% for 3 or more years). We used negative binomial regression models with fixed effects, adjusting for socio-economic, demographic and social welfare co-variables., Results: An increase in BFP coverage was associated with a reduction in suicide rates. The strongest effect was observed when in addition to greater municipal coverage (RR 0.942, 95% CI 0.936-0.947), the duration of the high coverage was maintained for 3 years or more (RR 0.952 95% CI 0.950-0.954)., Conclusions: The results provide evidence that the conditional cash transfer programme may reduce suicide in Brazilian municipalities, mitigating the effect of poverty on suicide incidence.

Introduction: Oral and oropharyngeal cancer are diseases strongly influenced by socioeconomic factors. The risk of developing these diseases increases with age and most cases occur in the elderly, with higher mortality rates. This study aimed to analyze the influence of municipal socioeconomic indices on mortality rates for oral (OC) and oropharyngeal cancer (OPC) in elderly residents from 645 cities in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, from 2013 to 2015., Method: Secondary data on deaths were obtained in the Mortality Information System from the Brazilian Ministry of Health. The number of elderly, as well as per capita median income values and Human Development Index by municipality (HDI-M) values were obtained from data by the SEADE Foundation. Descriptiveand exploratory analysis of data was performed, followed by negative binomial models described by the Proc Genmod procedure and evaluated by the corrected AIC (Akaike Information Criterion), the likelihood level, and the Wald test (α = 0.05)., Results: Around 30% of the cities notified deaths in 2013, 16.74% in 2014, and 18.61% in 2015. Founded mortality mean rates from OC and OPC were, respectively, 20.0 (± 430.9) and 10.7 (± 17.5) deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Meanincome ranged, in local currency, from 434.2 to 2,009.00. HDI-M ranged from 0.65 to 0.89. There was a significant decrease (p<0.05) in mortality rates for OC and OPC in elderly with the increase in the cities' mean income and HDI-M values., Conclusion: Socioeconomic inequalities in the cities the on mortality rates for OC and OPC in elderly residents.

Estuaries provide significant cultural ecosystem services, including recreation and tourism. Disruptions of estuarine biogeochemical processes resulting from environmental degradation could interrupt the flow of these services, reducing benefits and diminishing the welfare of local communities. This study focused on recreational shellfishing in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts (41.55°N, 70.80°W). Relationships among measures of recreational shellfishing, estuarine water quality, and local socioeconomic conditions were tested to understand how the benefits of cultural ecosystem services to local communities might be affected by declining water quality. Transferring estimated economic benefits from an analysis of nearby municipalities, the study finds that increases in Chl a during the 24-year period were associated with losses in recreational shellfishing benefits of $0.08-0.67 million per decade. The approach presented here suggests a more broadly applicable framework for assessing the impacts of changes in coastal ecosystem water quality on the welfare of local communities., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Whether place-based welfare programs affect fertility and health outcomes is an understudied question. I estimate the health impacts of the Empowerment Zone (EZ) program-a federal program that gave sizeable grants and tax breaks to certain high-poverty census tracts in selected cities. Using difference-in-differences methods, I find that the EZ program decreased fertility rates by 11 percent and improved birth outcomes. Compositional changes in fertility likely cannot explain changes in infant health. Recent research on the later-life impacts of low birth weight suggest that the health impacts of this program may have substantial long-term benefits., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Recent tobacco taxation research suggests that excise tax structure plays an important role in the effectiveness of increasing taxes in reducing consumption. However, evidence on excise tax structures of alcoholic beverages is scarce. We linked price variability measures for beer, wine, and liquor in the US derived using Economist Intelligence Unit city data from 2003 to 2016 with state-level excise tax structures from the Alcohol Policy Information System. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions were performed to assess the associations between excise tax structures and price variability, for beer, wine, and liquor (spirits), respectively. Results suggest that, compared with a specific excise beer tax structure based on volumes, a mixed structure with both specific and ad valorem components was associated with 38% (p≤0.01) greater beer price variability. In addition, a mixed excise tax structure for liquor was associated with 60-77% (p≤0.01) greater liquor price variability. However, these associations do not imply a causal link between tax structures and price variability. In summary, a mixed excise tax structure is associated with greater variability in beer and liquor prices, an indicator for tax avoidance opportunities. Future research is needed to identify the causal impact of tax structures on price variability., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

The study's objective was to explore the association between the components of fixed and variable Minimum Basic Care (Portuguese: PAB), sociodemographic factors, epidemiological profile, and municipal spending in primary health care in Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil. An ecological study in 496 municipalities (counties) in the state was carried out. Mean variable municipal spending from 2011 to 2013 from the financial block of primary health care, representing the actual spending with federal budget transfers, was based on data from the Management Report of the Strategic Management Support Room, and multiple linear regression was used. To adjust the model, variables were grouped in five blocks according to the study's objective. Mean spending on primary health care was BRL 81.20 (SD ± 35.50) per inhabitant-year. The block of variables comprising the fixed PAB component explained 39% (R2 = 0.39) of the variability in spending between municipalities, while for the variable PAB block, R2 was 0.82, in the sociodemographic block, R2 was 0.26, in the structure-performance block R2 was 0.46, and in the epidemiological profile block the R2 was 0.15. In the final model, the variable associated with the highest estimated values for spending on primary health care was the rate of family health teams. Municipalities with 135 to 41 teams per 100,000 inhabitant-years spend BRL 51.00 more per capita than municipalities with zero to 0 to 8 teams. Spending on primary health care appears to be linked more to federal induction than to factors associated with health care demand, such as the demographic and epidemiological profile of the municipalities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Objective: We evaluated the effects of outlet and small area level malt liquor policies on crime in 10 U.S. cities and hypothesized that more restrictive malt liquor policies would be associated with greater reductions in crime., Method: We used a pooled time-series study design (i.e., panel regression) with comparison areas to test our hypothesis. Quarterly crime rates in targeted areas were compared 3 years before and after policy adoption. Four crime outcomes were analyzed: Selected Part II crimes, assaults, vandalism/property damage, and disorderly conduct. Both the presence and absence of a malt liquor policy (yes, no) and degree of restrictiveness of the malt liquor policy were assessed using a newly created measure of malt liquor policy restrictiveness developed by the investigators. Results were analyzed using a series of linear mixed models., Results: Adoption of malt liquor policies was not associated with Part II selected crimes. For individual crimes (e.g., assaults, vandalism, disorderly conduct), we found mixed results as more restrictive malt liquor policies were significantly associated with decreases as well as increases in crime. In general, the evaluated policies were considered to be not highly restrictive., Conclusions: Our findings suggest that malt liquor policies at the outlet or small area level alone may not be sufficient to reduce crime associated with malt liquor use. Policies that are more restrictive or cover larger areas than assessed in the current study may be required to have an independent effect on crime outcomes.

Tourist satisfaction has always been a crucial research issue in the tourism economy. This paper utilizes the Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) to analyze the impact of urban tourism satisfaction on urban macroeconomics from a macro perspective, using quarterly data on tourist satisfaction in 35 large and medium-sized cities along with major urban macroeconomic variables. This study is quite distinct from previous research that focused on constructing a tourist satisfaction index and analyzing the influence factors of tourism satisfaction from the perspective of the micro-level internal composition of tourism. The empirical results show: Firstly, in respect of the impact of urban tourists' satisfaction on the GDP income of cities, the SDM and the SDM with a lagged first-order dependent variable (SDM&#95;dlag) show that the short-term and long-term indirect effects of log-tourist satisfaction are significantly positive, indicating that city satisfaction has a significant positive spatial spillover effect on GDP growth in other cities; Secondly, in respect of the influence of urban tourist satisfaction on the cost of urban life in the SDM, the long-term direct and indirect effects of logarithmic satisfaction are significantly positive, implying, in the long run, that tourist satisfaction has a positive intraregional spillover effect and spatial spillover effect on urban living costs; Finally, the SDM&#95;dlag for the regression of urban tourist satisfaction on the cost of urban daily life shows that the short-run direct and indirect effects of city tourist satisfaction are significantly negative, indicating that tourist satisfaction has intra-regional and spatial spillover effects, and its rise will reduce the cost of living expenses in local and other cities in the short term. Overall, we have further elucidated the role of different levels of urban tourist satisfaction in city macroeconomics from the spatial dimension, thereby enriching the existing research on tourist satisfaction to some certain extent., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Underground wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) have achieved fast development in China in recent years. Due to the remarkable differences between underground and conventional aboveground construction mode, legislation including technical specifications and regulations for underground WWTPs, which was revealed in vacancy, should be issued in time to promote its development. It is also expected to avoid not-in-my-backyard sentiment by decreasing negative effects of WWTPs via construction in sealed underground space. This research took Beijing city as case study to investigate the impacts of WWTPs on nearby community from the perspective of housing price quantitatively. Differences-in-Difference (DID) model result indicates that WWTPs inhibited nearby housing price increases, leading to huge financial losses. The closer are the houses and WWTPs, the severer were the inhibition effects, indicating the relationship between environmental quality and property price. During 2016⁻2017, the deteriorated estate value surrounding the investigated WWTPs in Beijing was estimated as high as 32.53 billion RMB, much higher than their construction cost of about 4.38 billion RMB. Transformation from grey to green by underground construction was expected to avoid these huge value distortions, while providing alternative to enhance WWTPs with various social functions for public services. This research demonstrates the high social requirements in highly developed cities to promote fast development of underground WWTPs in China.

During the last years, the new science of cities has been established as a fertile quantitative approach to systematically understand the urban phenomena. One of its main pillars is the proposition that urban systems display universal scaling behavior regarding socioeconomic, infrastructural and individual basic services variables. This paper discusses the extension of the universality proposition by testing it against a broad range of urban metrics in a developing country urban system. We present an exploration of the scaling exponents for over 60 variables for the Brazilian urban system. Estimating those exponents is challenging from the technical point of view because the Brazilian municipalities' definition follows local political criteria and does not regard characteristics of the landscape, density, and basic utilities. As Brazilian municipalities can deviate significantly from urban settlements, urban-like municipalities were selected based on a systematic density cut-off procedure and the scaling exponents were estimated for this new subset of municipalities. To validate our findings we compared the results for overlaying variables with other studies based on alternative methods. It was found that the analyzed socioeconomic variables follow a superlinear scaling relationship with the population size, and most of the infrastructure and individual basic services variables follow expected sublinear and linear scaling, respectively. However, some infrastructural and individual basic services variables deviated from their expected regimes, challenging the universality hypothesis of urban scaling. We propose that these deviations are a product of top-down decisions/policies. Our analysis spreads over a time-range of 10 years, what is not enough to draw conclusive observations, nevertheless we found hints that the scaling exponent of these variables are evolving towards the expected scaling regime, indicating that the deviations might be temporally constrained and that the urban systems might eventually reach the expected scaling regime., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Objective This study aimed to identify the relationship between city-level economic development and smoking behaviour. Methods Using multilevel mixed-effects logistic methods, we examined the relationship between smoking/passive smoking and respondents' lifestyles in the city. Results We found that respondents living in cities with higher per capita gross domestic product (GDP) were less likely to smoke than those living in cities with lower per capita GDP (odds ratio [OR] = 0.977, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.958-0.997). Further, respondents with higher levels of life satisfaction and subjective social status were less likely to smoke than those with lower levels of these variables (OR = 0.942, 95% CI: 0.893-0.994; OR = 0.955, 95% CI: 0.928-0.983, respectively). In terms of passive smoking, respondents with higher levels of subjective social status in their cities were less likely to smoke than those with lower levels (OR = 0.972, 95% CI: 0.948-0.996). Smoking and exposure to second-hand smoke were more common among those with lower socioeconomic status. Conclusions Smoking is one of the most serious public health hazards in China. People's smoking behaviour is significantly related to characteristics of their cities and their socioeconomic status. Improved smoking-prevention measures are urgently required in China.

Background : Particulate air pollution, especially PM 2.5 , is highly correlated with various adverse health impacts and, ultimately, economic losses for society, however, few studies have undertaken a spatiotemporal assessment of PM 2.5 -related economic losses from health impacts covering all of the main cities in China. Methods : PM 2.5 concentration data were retrieved for 190 Chinese cities for the period 2014⁻2016. We used a log-linear exposure⁻response model and monetary valuation methods, such as value of a statistical life (VSL), amended human capital (AHC), and cost of illness to evaluate PM 2.5 -related economic losses from health impacts at the city level. In addition, Monte Carlo simulation was used to analyze uncertainty. Results : The average economic loss was 0.3% (AHC) to 1% (VSL) of the total gross domestic product (GDP) of 190 Chinese cities from 2014 to 2016. Overall, China experienced a downward trend in total economic losses over the three-year period, but the Beijing⁻Tianjin⁻Hebei, Shandong Peninsula, Yangtze River Delta, and Chengdu-Chongqing regions experienced greater annual economic losses. Conclusions : Exploration of spatiotemporal variations in PM 2.5 -related economic losses from long-term health impacts could provide new information for policymakers regarding priority areas for PM 2.5 pollution prevention and control in China.

Aims: To analyse whether the Norwegian Central Government's goal of subsidizing 12,000 places in nursing homes or sheltered housing using an earmarked grant was reached and to determine towards which group of users the planned investments were targeted., Methods: Data from the investment plans at municipal level were provided by the Norwegian Housing Bank and linked to variables describing the municipalities' financial situation as well as variables describing the local needs for services provided by Statistics Norway. Using regression analyses we estimated the associations between municipal characteristics and planned investments in total and by type of care place., Results: The Norwegian Central Government reached its goal of giving subsidies to 12,000 new or rebuilt places in nursing homes and sheltered housing. A total of 54% of the subsidies (6878 places) were given to places in nursing homes. About 7500 places were available by the end of the planning period and the rest were under construction. About 50% of the places were planned for user groups aged <67 years and 23% of the places for users aged <25 years. One-third of the places were planned for users with intellectual disabilities. Investments in nursing homes were correlated with the share of the population older than 80 years and investments in sheltered houses were correlated with the share of users with intellectual disabilities., Conclusions: Earmarked grants to municipalities can be adequate measures to affect local resource allocation and thereby stimulate investments in future care. With the current institutional setup the municipalities adapt investments to local needs.

Mapping and quantifying urban landscape dynamics and the underlying driving factors are crucial for devising appropriate policies, especially in cities of developing countries where the change is rapid. This study analyzed three decades (1984-2014) of land use land cover change of Addis Ababa using Landsat imagery and examined the underlying factors and their temporal dynamics through expert interview using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Classification results revealed that urban area increased by 50%, while agricultural land and forest decreased by 34 and 16%, respectively. The driving factors operated differently during the pre and post-1991 period. The year 1991 was chosen because it marked government change in the country resulting in policy change. Policy had the highest influence during the pre-1991 period. Land use change in this period was associated with the housing sector as policies and institutional setups were permissive to this sector. Population growth and in-migration were also important factors. Economic factors played significant role in the post-1991 period. The fact that urban land has a market value, the growth of private investment, and the speculated property market were among the economic factors. Policy reforms since 2003 were also influential to the change. Others such as accessibility, demography, and neighborhood factors were a response to economic factors. All the above-mentioned factors had vital role in shaping the urban pattern of the city. These findings can help planners and policymakers to better understand the dynamic relationship of urban land use and the driving factors to better manage the city.

"The Belt and Road" initiative has been expected to facilitate interactions among numerous city centers. This initiative would generate a number of centers, both economic and political, which would facilitate greater interaction. To explore how information flows are merged and the specific opportunities that may be offered, Chinese cities along "the Belt and Road" are selected for a case study. Furthermore, urban networks in cyberspace have been characterized by their infrastructure orientation, which implies that there is a relative dearth of studies focusing on the investigation of urban hierarchies by capturing information flows between Chinese cities along "the Belt and Road". This paper employs Baidu, the main web search engine in China, to examine urban hierarchies. The results show that urban networks become more balanced, shifting from a polycentric to a homogenized pattern. Furthermore, cities in networks tend to have both a hierarchical system and a spatial concentration primarily in regions such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta region. Urban hierarchy based on web search activity does not follow the existing hierarchical system based on geospatial and economic development in all cases. Moreover, urban networks, under the framework of "the Belt and Road", show several significant corridors and more opportunities for more cities, particularly western cities. Furthermore, factors that may influence web search activity are explored. The results show that web search activity is significantly influenced by the economic gap, geographical proximity and administrative rank of the city.