Growth and Change最新文献

The Healthy Streets Approach has emerged as a human-centered framework for evaluating urban streets in terms of health, safety, and quality of life. Despite its growing prominence in contemporary urban design and policy, its applicability to historic urban environments, characterized by conservation constraints and unique spatial qualities, remains underexplored. Addressing this gap, this study reinterprets the healthy streets within historic contexts by integrating with the streetscape characteristics of heritage environments, and proposes a “healthy historic streets” perspective. The study focuses on Belediye Street, located in the historic city center of Kastamonu, Türkiye. A multi-criteria assessment framework was developed based on six key dimensions: walkability and active mobility, safety, perceptual-physical comfort, air environmental quality, social interaction and inclusivity and place identity attachment. Data were collected through field observations, noise measurements, pedestrian traffic counts and user surveys, and were analyzed using statistical methods. The findings reveal both synergies and tensions between health-oriented street criteria and heritage conservation principles, particularly regarding accessibility, environmental quality, and spatial usability. Based on these insights, context-sensitive design and planning recommendations were developed to enhance public use while preserving the street's historic character. The study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that the Healthy Streets Approach can be effectively adapted to historic urban contexts and offers a transferable assessment framework for integrating public health objectives with heritage conservation. It highlights the potential of historic streets not only as preserved cultural assets but also as active, health-supportive public spaces within contemporary urban systems.

The article examines various definitions, interpretations, and evaluations of the concept of “density” as it pertains to the anthropogenic environment, drawing from both professional and scientific literature, as well as regulatory frameworks from different countries. It highlights the commonalities and the diverse, sometimes contradictory, approaches and assessments found in various publications concerning social, economic, ecological, infrastructural, and other factors related to this concept within the urban environment. This study explores the relationship between building density and population safety, particularly in the context of natural disaster risks. Given that the entire territory of the Republic of Armenia is susceptible to strong earthquakes, the study uses a specific section of the capital, Yerevan, to assess the potential levels of vulnerability of buildings constructed at different times, with varying structural systems and storeys, and differing degrees of seismic resistance. The scope of issues arising from an earthquake was evaluated using graphical modeling. As a result of the research, recommendations were made to reduce the area's vulnerability and to establish safety corridors.

This study examines how alignment among economic, OD-based functional, and rail-accessibility dimensions of centrality changed in the Seoul Metropolitan Area and which municipal changes were associated with 2020 mismatch. We construct separate measures from land-price and economic-activity data, OD flows, and station-based rail-accessibility indicators for 59 municipalities observed at five target years from 2000 to 2020. Mean rank mismatch increased from 0.182 to 0.243, while Kendall's W declined from 0.748 to 0.604. The economic-functional gap accounted for 50.2% of the increase, although it remained the smallest pairwise gap in 2020. Mismatch showed substantial but incomplete temporal persistence. After accounting for baseline mismatch and metropolitan location, municipalities with larger increases in the share of residents aged 65 and older had lower 2020 mismatch; estimates for changes in one-person-household and manufacturing-employment shares were imprecise. Economic concentration, realized mobility, and rail accessibility therefore became less consistently aligned over the study period. For planning and center identification, a single centrality dimension may conceal municipalities whose economic, functional, and accessibility profiles diverge.

Ontario accounts for the overwhelming majority of Canada's motor vehicle production, yet its exposure to Mexican manufacturing shocks has generally been treated as indirect, transmitted only through Canada's relationship with the United States. This paper tests that assumption using a purpose-built panel of 10 Canadian provinces and 12 US states, with Mexico's manufacturing cluster growth as a common shock variable (2006Q1–2024Q4). Granger causality tests, the primary evidence, show that Mexico's nearshoring shock predicts Ontario directly (χ² = 15.21, p < 0.001) while the US automotive corridor does not (χ² = 0.83, p = 0.661). A placebo test confirms automotive specificity: motor vehicles respond on impact, aerospace does not. Markov-switching regression shows Mexico and the US achieve 97.4% regime concordance while Ontario enters recession independently in 16 of 76 quarters, including a rising episode from 2023Q4 without a continental counterpart. Local projections corroborate this response, though differential estimates do not survive wild cluster bootstraps and are treated as directional. These results are consistent with a triangular rather than bilateral network, Mexico as the upstream source, with Ontario and the US Midwest as parallel downstream receivers, with implications for regional-science models of stratified production geographies and for the USMCA review initiated in July 2026.

Based on micro-level data for nearly five million firms, this study measures the spatial agglomeration of digital firms in 297 Chinese cities from 2000 to 2023 using the DO. GIS-based spatial analysis and an XGBoost-SHAP machine learning model are then used to examine its spatiotemporal evolution and associated factors. The results show that digital firm agglomeration in China increased over the study period. The agglomeration scale is 15–35 km. The spatial pattern shifted from point-based clustering in a few southeastern coastal cities to a multi-core agglomeration structure. Digital inclusive finance, university supply, and research and development human capital are identified as the core factors associated with digital firm agglomeration. When university supply exceeds 13.51, the interaction effect of digital inclusive finance becomes positive. When the number of research and development personnel exceeds 128,136, its positive effect increases substantially. The heterogeneity results show clear regional differences. Eastern China depends on digital inclusive finance and university supply, whereas central China depends mainly on digital inclusive finance. Western China is more strongly affected by basic urban conditions, such as the level of economic development. Higher-tier cities depend on innovation resources, whereas lower-tier cities rely more on digital inclusive finance. Different types of digital firms are influenced by knowledge and talent resources, user bases, and digital inclusive finance, respectively. This study provides empirical evidence for optimizing the spatial layout of digital industries and formulating differentiated policies.

AI-related hiring demand is unevenly distributed across urban labor markets. Using online job-posting data from Chinese listed firms between 2016 and 2024, this study constructs a city–occupation–year panel and examines whether expanding AI-related hiring demand is associated with differences in the structure of occupational hiring demand within cities. The results show that: (1) higher city-level AI-related hiring demand is significantly associated with greater relative hiring demand for occupations that are more closely related to AI. This finding indicates that AI-related opportunities are not evenly distributed across occupations; instead, hiring demand is selectively concentrated in occupations with stronger links to AI. The result remains robust across a series of robustness checks; (2) AI-related hiring expansion is associated with stronger hiring demand for digitally complementary occupations and a larger share of AI-related vacancies within occupations; and (3) these associations are more pronounced in cities with greater higher-education capacity and more developed innovation ecosystems. This study extends the literature on AI and the structure of urban labor demand and provides recruitment-based evidence relevant to cities seeking to improve talent-development systems, strengthen their innovation environments, and address the growing divergence in occupational demand associated with AI.

In rural China, ritual gift expenditure is often viewed as expressive consumption, a ritual obligation, or a financial burden embedded in renqing relations. Its possible role as social-capital investment, however, remains less understood. Using an unbalanced panel from the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 waves of the China Family Panel Studies, this paper examines the association between ritual gift expenditure and rural household income. We estimate household and year fixed-effects models and use mechanism tests to explore possible pathways. The results show a statistically significant positive association. This association remains robust to alternative variable definitions, sample adjustments, and supplementary analyses that partially address endogeneity concerns. Mechanism results provide suggestive evidence for pathways through liquidity buffers, entrepreneurship, non-farm employment, and productive fixed assets. The association is weaker among households with Internet use, consistent with the possibility that digital access reduces reliance on traditional renqing networks. Subsample analyses indicate broadly stable associations, with somewhat larger point estimates among older, low-income, and western households. The findings offer policy implications for rural social-capital governance and income support under China's rural revitalization strategy.

Graduate migration plays a key role in the spatial reallocation of human capital, yet little is known about how graduate migration mechanisms differ across directions within a hierarchical urban system. Using LinkedIn resume data, this study classifies intercity graduate migration in China into upward, lateral, and downward modes and examines the economic opportunities and urban amenities associated with each migration trajectory. We show that three migration modes exhibit distinct spatial patterns, with upward migration towards first-tier and new first-tier cities dominating national flows and downward migration occurring mainly between higher- and lower-tier cities within regions. Over time, new first-tier cities have become increasingly important destinations for graduates. Empirical results indicate that graduate migration is jointly associated with economic opportunities and urban amenities in both origin and destination cities. The temporal analysis shows that wages, climatic conditions, and healthcare provision in destination cities have become increasingly important over time. Migration mechanisms also differ across the urban hierarchy: upward migration is primarily associated with destination economic opportunities, whereas downward migration is associated with both push factors from higher-tier origin cities and pull factors from improving opportunities and living conditions in lower-tier destinations. These relationships further vary across human capital groups, while talent-attraction policies are associated with shifts in graduates’ responses to destination characteristics. By extending the traditional push-pull framework to incorporate urban hierarchy, human capital heterogeneity, and institutional context, this study provides a more nuanced understanding of the factors associated with intercity graduate mobility.

This study examines how advertised graduate-oriented entry-level opportunity sets are unevenly organized across Chinese cities and how urban opportunity regimes evolve over time. Existing research on labor market entry and interurban differentiation rarely conceptualizes entry-level opportunities as multidimensional city-level configurations. Using online recruitment data on graduate-oriented job postings for 200 Chinese cities from 2016 to 2024, this study combines inequality measures, Gaussian mixture models, and Markov-based transition analysis to examine the scale, quality, and structure of entry-level opportunities. The results show substantial interurban inequality. Inequality in opportunity scale and structure declined over time, whereas opportunity quality remained the most unequal dimension and displayed the strongest spatial clustering. Four urban opportunity regimes are identified: a Scale-led regime, an Intermediate regime, a High-quality, high-structure regime, and a Moderate-quality, lower-structure regime. The Scale-led regime is the most persistent, whereas the High-quality, high-structure regime remains the least persistent in the high-posterior comparison, although the estimated magnitude of its persistence is sensitive to classification confidence. These findings show that a less concentrated observed distribution of online postings does not by itself imply a comparable equalization in the housing-cost-adjusted quality of advertised graduate-oriented opportunities.