Chinese cities are experiencing urban shrinkage due to demographic, environmental, economic, and political changes. However, urban form is another reason for urban shrinkage. This study first identified the shrinking of 293 cities in China based on the values of the change in brightness extracted from multi-year nighttime light data. Next, the characteristics of construction land morphology from 2019 were analyzed using landscape pattern analysis. Finally, the impact of urban form on urban shrinkage was explored using Geodetector. The results show that: (1) In total, 293 cities experienced different degrees of shrinkage. Regions with severe shrinkage were concentrated in the underdeveloped provinces, and autonomous central and western regions of China; moreover, (2) All factors of urban form significantly affected urban shrinkage. The largest q-values were found in patch density (0.144) and urban area (0.133), indicating that the degree of construction land fragmentation and urban area scale affected urban shrinkage the most; and (3) The interaction effects of pairwise factors were mutually or nonlinearly enhanced. The influence of urban form and socio-economic factors was stronger than that of socio-economic factors alone. This shows that the coupling of urban form and socio-economic factors strengthens the impact of urban form on urban shrinkage.

As China is transitioning from a planned economy to a market-based economy, over the past 30 years, China’s economy has experienced the same type of changes that led to amenity-driven housing and land markets in more developed countries. This paper examines the effect of different types of amenities on urban land and housing prices across Chinese cities in 2020. When firms and households value some amenities, the assumption is that the preference for these amenities will be valued and reflected in both land and housing markets. We conduct a cross-sectional analysis of urban land and housing prices in prefecture and higher-level cities in China. We extend the Roback model to explore the extent to which the different land rents and housing prices reflect the compensations for interregional amenity differences across Chinese cities. We include two types of amenities: natural amenities and locally produced amenities. We perform two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimations and compute the implicit prices of various amenities for households and firms. The empirical results show that a range of amenities is valued by both households and firms, resulting in higher housing and industrial prices.

This article aims to examine the characteristics of cities where New Urbanism (NU) developments are located as of 2019. We first develop a set of hypotheses to explore why some cities are welcoming NU developments more than other cities and how the cities differ in terms of general real estate development determinants, fiscal capacity and regulatory authority, advocacy group support, and cultural diversity. We then employ a Negative Binomial Regression to test the relationship between concentrations of NU developments and a variety of city characteristics by using a data set of 6923 urban cities. The results suggest that NU developments are advocated by cities with a higher level of environmental awareness, better fiscal and regulatory status, and better cultural diversity. The research results highlight the importance of continuously gaining support from environmental groups and the general public for effective expansion of New Urbanist developments within the U.S. These findings also indicate that for noteworthy changes in growth patterns to arise at a large scale across the U.S., there must be changes in values and preferences, and institutional capacity in updating land-use regulations that allow for sustainable growth.

As global urbanization accelerates and climate change intensifies, issues related to land use and management have increasingly garnered attention within the international academic community

Resident-generated service requests are increasingly used in data-driven urban management, but complaint records may reflect uneven administrative visibility rather than objective service needs. This study develops a benchmark-based 311 visibility audit as a diagnostic tool for sustainability governance, examining whether local service conditions become sufficiently visible to support inclusive, anticipatory, and resilient urban management. Using New York City’s 2023 311 records for six complaint categories—Heat/Hot Water, Noise—Residential, Rodent, Water System, Sewer, and Air Quality—the analysis constructs a tract-by-month-by-complaint-type panel and compares tract-level complaint shares with population, housing-related exposure, and rodent inspection benchmarks. The final dataset contains 661,251 geocoded requests across 2243 positive-population census tracts. Results show substantial complaint-type differences in population-benchmark mismatch: Air Quality has the largest exact total variation distance and Noise—Residential the smallest, while under-visible coverage exceeds over-visible coverage in all six categories. Alternative housing benchmarks change selected Heat/Hot Water and Rodent interpretations, and the external rodent check identifies 46 primary blind-spot candidates, narrowed to 17 benchmark-confirmed candidates. The study concludes that 311 systems should be used as diagnostic infrastructures for identifying information blind spots, not as direct measures of urban need or sustainability performance.

Dynamic drone delivery requires rules for retaining and revising released plans. We specify a closed-loop architecture separating ordinary replanning access, assignment-change penalties, and shared safety intervention, while explicitly identifying closed-gate task filling. Three role-differentiated drones and a mobile support platform are evaluated using demand and weather proxies on all 88 eligible holdout dates. Four policies cross always-open or event-gated access with fixed or adaptive inertia. A paired NoFill intervention removes ordinary closed-gate filling without disabling planned execution or safety checks. Full factorial effects and calendar-block uncertainty replace the original selected-contrast, independent-date analysis. With fixed inertia, the Original event-gated policy increases completion by 5.806 percentage points (seven-day block 95% interval: 4.016 to 7.601) but increases flight energy by 10.414 Wh per completed order. Without filling, its completion difference is −3.431 points (−5.187 to −2.005). Ordinary planning access and assignment changes remain lower. Incremental adaptive-inertia benefits under event-gated access are unresolved. The results identify a conditional architectural trade-off, not a pure replanning-frequency benefit. The fixed simulation window, transferred physical inputs, and unmodelled operational constraints limit inference beyond this setting.