Since the financial crisis in 2008, innovation has gradually become the orientation of global economic development and the strategic choice for China’s urban development. With the transformation of the urban development mode from factor-driven and capital-driven to innovation-driven, many innovation spaces have begun to emerge in cities, which attract academic attention. A large number of studies on the relation between innovation activities and geographic space mainly focus on the phenomena at the regional level, and the city is only regarded as a target of innovation activities agglomeration. The study on the distribution of innovation space within the city is insufficient. In particular, there is a lack of studies on the spatial-temporal evolution of urban innovation space distribution. However, the study on the spatial-temporal evolution characteristics of urban innovation space distribution can provide planning countermeasures for the construction of innovative cities in China. Taking Nanjing as an empirical area, the spatial-temporal evolution of urban innovation space distribution was studied through methods such as average nearest neighbor, standard deviational ellipse, kernel density estimation, and exploratory spatial data analysis based on the data of high-tech enterprises identified from 2008 to 2019. The results showed the following: (1) the distribution of urban innovation space has significant spatial agglomeration characteristics, and the degree of agglomeration continued to rise; (2) regardless of the macro- or microperspective, the distribution of urban innovation space has shown the characteristic of diffusion at the initial, but the trend of polarization in recent years is significant; and (3) the distribution of urban innovation space exhibited diverse agglomeration modes and evolution trends in different regions, and it can be divided into three categories: grouped, banded, and scattered.

Indemnificatory housing programs—a kind of state-backed urban low-end and nonmarket housing programs which used to be welfare—have now increasingly evolved to be the vehicle to promote capital accumulation. Most of these housing communities show peripherization with high rates of unemployment, low income, poverty, and social exclusion, which violates their sustainability. This paper examines the impacts of land-centered urban transformation on indemnificatory housing communities, and analyzes the causes of unsustainable outcomes in political economy discourse. To achieve this, the social and economic conditions of a longstanding suburban indemnificatory housing community in Nanjing were analyzed. Survey data collected from March to April 2016 was evaluated to determine the peripherization of the residents within it. We found that for many residents, high rates of unemployment, low income, and poverty were mainly caused by their individual demographic and socioeconomic disadvantages, with the peripheral physical and social location contributing by exacerbating their vulnerabilities. It is concluded that local governments’ land-centered urban transformation and the central government’s affordable housing policies aimed at social and economic crisis mitigation combine to produce suburban indemnificatory housing communities, driving low-income relocated residents into more disadvantaged situations. This finding creates important lessons for the sustainable development of Chinese indemnificatory housing communities.

The capability of rural community governance is significantly impacted by the different types of land ownership when capital investment in rural tourism to achieve rural revitalisation. The outcomes of which profoundly affect sustainable rural development. This study, by utilising a theoretical framework using double movement theory, aims to assess the impacts on rural community governance by two different land ownership models, the Enterprise-based Model (EBM) and the Community-based Model (CBM), in the process of capital flow to the countryside (CFC). Case studies of the two villages were adopted to examine and explore the logic of interaction between stakeholders and reveal the internal mechanism of rural community governance. The results of this research indicate that the CBM has considerable advantages over the EBM. In the CBM, the village collective retains land ownership without fully marketising, which allows villagers to maintain their bargaining power with investors whilst increasing their local awareness. In the EBM, however, the local government promotes the conversion of land ownership. The villagers benefit more from one-time acquisition but lose sustainable benefits created by local development. Stakeholders call for the need to create a development model beyond the market economy by maintaining China's rural land system in the process of CFC. In this regard, this paper provides an original contribution.