This paper uses a market potential approach to examine the evolution of the rail transport network of China and its spatial distributional impacts on local accessibility, with a particular focus on high-speed rail improvements. Accessibility is measured by using a “market potential” function that was derived from the general equilibrium model of the economic geography literature, and is empirically calculated based on Geographical Information System (GIS) techniques. A key finding, albeit from a highly stylized model, is that rail improvements may help raise territorial polarizing patterns across counties. The results point to the profound implications of railroad network expansion on the accessibility dynamics in periphery regions relative to core regions.

Since the reform and opening up, China has been embedded in global economy. As one of the fastest developing regions, the Pearl River Delta in South China has rapidly developed from an agriculture-based region to a world factory and is subsequently becoming a global innovation center. In the process of rapid development of globalization, marketization and decentralization, how the planning theory and planning concept are applied in this region? And how does the planning adapt to the needs of development to do the space regulation? This paper combs the previous regional plannings of the Pearl River Delta, analyzing how to effectively guide and reshape the sustainable development space under the background of land and space disorder. Four key conclusions emerge from this review. First, the concept of planning has been developing from incremental planning to stock planning. Second, there is a transformation of planning contents that is from building of an economy-oriented production space like industry park planning, to improving quality of the living space and providing environment-friendly ecological space such as greenway planning and quality living circle planning. Third, the upgrading of planning technological means is reflected in the change from expression of concept articles to visualization of big data. Fourth, it shows an obvious change from rigid governance to flexible and multi-scale governance.

This study analyzes regional development in one of the poorest provinces in China, Guizhou Province, between 2000 and 2012 using a multiscale and multi-mechanism framework. In general, regional inequality has been declining since 2000. In addition, economic development in Guizhou Province presented spatial agglomeration and club convergence, which shows how the development pattern of core-periphery has been developed between 2006 and 2012. Multilevel regression analysis revealed that industrialization, marketization and investment level were the primary driving forces of regional economic disparity in Guizhou Province. We can get a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved in regional inequality in Guizhou Province with the multilevel regression models. The influences of decentralization on regional economic disparity were actually relatively weak, and investment level exhibited more importance on the regional inequality when the variable of time was considered. In addition, both the topography and urban-rural differentiation were the two main reasons for forming a core-periphery structure in Guizhou Province.

Controlling land use change in coastal areas is one of the world’s sustainable development goals and a great challenge. Existing research includes in-depth studies of land use change in relatively developed regions, but research on economically less developed but fast-growing regions is lacking. Since the reform and opening up in Vietnam, the influences of globalization have prompted the economy of the coastal area to develop rapidly, making it one of the less developed but rapidly developing regions where human activities and global changes vigorously interact. Therefore, taking the coastal area of Vietnam as the study area, we used the land use change index and random forest model to analyze the spatial variations of land use change and its impact factors. The research shows that: (1) land use shows a trend of continuous and rapid increase in construction land, with the proportion of construction land increasing from 2.72% in 2000 to 4.40% in 2020. However, natural landscapes, such as forests and grasslands, are decreasing. (2) Land use also shows obvious spatial variation characteristics, which are mainly manifested in the differences in change rate, development intensity, and distribution characteristics. Among them, the region with the largest rate of change was the Central Coastal Area. The region with the highest development intensity is the Mekong River Delta. (3) The main factors affecting land use change are foreign direct investment (FDI), the industrialization index, and population. Based on that, we analyzed the mechanism influencing the above factors from the perspectives of urbanization and population growth, and industrialization and park construction, as well as globalization and FDI, which can explain well the relationship between the impact factors and the spatial variation. This study can provide a valuable decision-making reference for formulating reasonable regional land development policies and is a good example of land use research for other rapidly developing areas.