With increasingly high housing prices, the urban housing problem has changed from an economic issue to a livelihood issue in China. Taking 32 major cities in China as an example, this paper employed data from 2007 to 2016 to build a panel data model to empirically study the impact of population migration on urban housing prices. From the two perspectives of the national level and regional level (eastern region, central region and western region), the results of this study showed that (1) on the national level, population inflow had a significant positive correlation with urban housing prices, where a population inflow rate increase of 1% increased urban housing prices by 0.31%; and (2) on the regional level, a population inflow rate increase of 1% increased urban housing prices in the eastern region by 1.34%, but population inflow had no obvious impact on the urban housing prices in the central and western regions. Based on the results, this study suggested addressing housing supply imbalances through housing product diversification and affordable housing system improvement, and addressing construction land supply imbalances by building a perfect system linking land-use planning to population; at the same time, it also suggested building more nationally central cities following the urbanization trend, and taking this as the key to developing urban agglomerations, reasonably decentralizing the population flow, promoting the healthy and stable development of the real-estate market and advancing sustainable urbanization. The above conclusions have practical significance for China and other developing countries to coordinate population and urban development in the process of rapid urbanization.

This study aims to investigate the spatial and temporal dynamics of housing prices associated with the urban infrastructure in Wuhan, China. The relationship between urban infrastructure and housing prices during rapid urbanization has drawn popular concerns. This article takes 619 residential communities during the period 2010 to 2018 in Wuhan’s main urban area as research units, and uses the geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model to study the spatial-temporal differentiation in the effects of urban infrastructure on housing prices. The results show that: 1) From 2010 to 2018, housing prices in Wuhan’s main urban area were generally on the rise, but the increment speed has shown an obvious periodic characteristic, the spatial distribution of housing prices has shown an obvious core and periphery distribution and the peak value area shifted from Hankou to Wuchang. 2) The influential factors of housing prices have significant spatiotemporal non-stationarity, while the impact, direction and intensity of the influential factors varies in time and space. Spatially, the influence factors show different differentiation rules for spatial distribution, and the influencing direction and strength of the urban infrastructure on housing prices are closely related to the spatial location, distribution density and the type of urban infrastructure. Temporally, the influencing strength of various urban facilities varies. This research will benefit both urban planners for optimizing urban facilities and policy-makers for formulating more specific housing policies, which ultimately contributes to urban sustainability.

The level of public participation in response to environmental issues in China has significantly increased over the past 10 years. This expansion of participation occurred as the government was pursuing legislative and regulatory approaches to address environmental pollution. Factors contributing to the development of environmental public participation are explored based on the political opportunity theory and post-materialist values theory. Two participation styles are used as dependent variables in a panel data framework. The empirical results of an analysis of provincial level data indicate that the degree of openness to participation and economic development level show consistently significant impacts on the levels of different environmental participation styles, thus demonstrating the applicability of the political opportunity theory and Inglehart’s post-materialist values theory in predicting environmental public participation in China. The results also show that other variables, including educational level and environmental pollution level have different or even reverse effects depending on the form of participation examined. In general, the results are consistent with cross-national studies of environmental policy development and political participation.

Manufacturing agglomeration (MA) is an important way to achieve high-quality industrial development and promote land use efficiency in China. However, there is a lack of research on the relationship between MA and the green use efficiency of industrial land (GUEIL). Based on the panel data of 279 prefecture-level cities in China, from 2004 to 2019, this study analyzes the spatial and temporal differentiation characteristics of MA and GUEIL, then empirically analyzes the impact of MA on GUEIL. The results show that: (1) during the study period, the national MA levels showed a slight decline, followed by a small increase. In addition, the inter-regional differences are mainly characterized as eastern region > central region > northeast region > western region. (2) The national and regional GUEIL showed a trend of increasing, slightly decreasing, and then increasing again. The overall regional differences in efficiency show the characteristics of: eastern region > central region > western region > northeastern region. (3) At the national scale, MA had a “U-shaped” relationship with GUEIL; at the regional scale, MA had a significant “U-shaped” effect on GUEIL in the northeast, central and western regions, while having a single negative effect in the eastern region. Finally, this study provides suggestions for optimizing the manufacturing structure and improving the GUEIL.