A recent examination of the significant role of public health has prompted calls to re-investigate how the urban environment affects public health. A vital part of the solution includes Healthy City initiatives that have been the subject of extensive policies, implications, and practices globally. However, the existing literature mainly focuses on big cities and metropolitan areas, while investigations into small and midsized cities (SMCs) are lacking, and thus reflect the underlying issues of health inequity. This study develops an indicator system for evaluating Healthy City initiatives in SMCs, linking urban design and public health, supported by the analyzed opinions from experts collected using both questionnaires and interviews. The indicator system includes six primary dimensions and 37 variables: urban form and transportation (UFT); health-friendly service (HFS); environmental quality and governance (EQG); community and facility (CF); green and open space (GOS); and ecological construction and biodiversity (ECB). A fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique was used to assess the relative importance of factors, emphasizing the importance of UFT, HFS, and EQG, with importance indexes of 0.175, 0.174, and 0.174, respectively. This indicator system is helpful for SMCs seeking to construct a Healthy City in the future, and is based on urban design and governance inputs and for enhancing the Healthy City knowledge base of cities of varied scales.

Based on transaction data at the parcel level in Beijing, this paper itemizes the costs incurred in the process of transferring rural land to urban development, quantifies the exact magnitude of land appreciation generated in this process and examines how the land wealth is distributed among involved parties. The main findings include the following: first, the land appreciation and the costs incurred in the process of land expropriation and primary development both differ from case to case; second, conventional comparison of the compensation for expropriated land with land granting price substantially overestimates the magnitude of land appreciation; the average and the median land appreciations account for 44.8% and 44.0% of the mean and median prices of granted serviced land, respectively; last, the compensation paid to affected farmers has improved in absolute terms during our study period from 2003 to 2014; however, because the land granting price has been escalating at a faster pace, the land wealth received by local governments has trended up.