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.

Detecting the characteristics and variability of droughts is of crucial importance. In this study, Guizhou Province in China is selected as the target area, and the dataset there covering daily precipitation and drought records from 1960 to 2016 is adopted. The spatial and temporal differences in yearly and seasonal Dnp (the drought indicator of continuous days without available precipitation) values and longest Dnp as well as their trends are examined. Then the Dnp values and droughts are classified into different categories, and the relationships between Dnp and droughts are revealed. There was a steep increasing trend in yearly Dnp with a rate of 6 d/10a, and the Mann–Kendall (MK) value was estimated to be 5.05 in the past 56 years. The seasonal Dnp values showed significant increasing trends. Yearly and seasonal Dnp varied significantly in the space domain. There were slight increases in yearly and four seasonal longest Dnp values in the time domain. Although the increases in the spring and summer were not significant, heavy droughts tended to occur at this time. As to the Dnp values corresponding to different levels of droughts, there was only a decrease in mild drought, while there were significant increases in mild, moderate, and heavy droughts. The mild droughts increased significantly in summer, and the moderate droughts increased significantly in spring. Different levels of Dnp also varied in the spatial domain. The elevation effect is not obvious in Guizhou province.