Although the emergent literature has evidently recorded the changes of regional land-use morphologies, these accounts typically focus on physical functions or structures. In this article, we propose a process-based constructivist framework for understanding the functional transition of rural homesteads from the perspective of "ways of using." This framework dissects the transition into two stages: the decline of the original function and the construction of alternative functions. Furthermore, we depict the spatial and household heterogeneity in these two stages arguing that the economic rationality of de jure villagers within China's socialist system shaped the functional transition. In essence, rural homesteads in dualistic China function as multifaceted entities, each embodying a variety of roles and purposes. The functional transition of homesteads could thus be regarded as trade-offs between villagers' immediate needs and maintaining the long-term capacity of the land to provide goods and services. By delving into these aspects, this article offers new insights into the often-overlooked aspects of land-use transitions (LUTs), and responds to scholarly calls for integrated theoretical approaches to understand LUTs and associated regional development strategies.

China's deep decarbonization of the built environment is hindered by institutional lock-ins in the circular economy transition. Applying Scott's three pillars of institutions and using document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and comparative case studies, this research diagnoses how fragmented regulations, cost-driven industry norms, and cognitive biases mutually reinforce stagnation. Successful projects demonstrate that alignment across pillars enables circular practices, while failures stem from misalignment. To break institutional lock-ins, governance innovations must shift green standards from voluntary to mandatory, embed circularity into financial and performance metrics, and establish multi-stakeholder platforms. These findings contribute a dynamic institutional explanation and contextualize transition barriers within China's strong state–strong market configuration, offering pathways for coordinated policy, market, and cultural change toward a low-carbon circular built environment.

The commodification of rural ecosystem services (ESs) has emerged as an important pathway for improving farmers’ livelihoods while promoting environmental protection in rural areas. However, quantitative evidence on the mechanisms and spatial heterogeneity underlying this process remains limited. Addressing this gap, this study develops a novel analytical framework based on a supply–demand perspective to systematically explain the spatial differentiation of ES commodification and its driving forces. Taking the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) in China as a case study, we apply the GeoDetector method to identify the determinants of under-commodification in rural areas. The results show that both resource-oriented and market-oriented indicators exert substantial explanatory power for the spatial patterns of ES commodification, while their interaction demonstrates an even stronger effect, highlighting the joint influence of natural resource endowments and market conditions. Furthermore, spatial disparities in commodification deficits largely result from a mismatch between the distribution of ecological resources and consumer markets. In economically developed regions, commodification is mainly constrained by the degradation of rural ecosystem functions, whereas in less developed regions the key barrier lies in the difficulty of forming niche markets. By integrating ecological supply conditions with market demand dynamics, this study provides new empirical insights into the mechanisms shaping the spatial unevenness of ES commodification and offers policy-relevant evidence for designing targeted interventions to promote the orderly development of rural ES markets across regions at different stages of development.

Green technology adoption and agricultural transition, as key elements of sustainable agricultural development, have long been central to academic inquiry. This paper investigates the spatial dynamics of agroecological transition and the mediating role of technology adoption within a three-dimensional conceptual framework of local environmental change, using Southern Jiangsu as a case study. The findings indicate that the transition follows an evolutionary diffusion pattern, radiating from the central urban areas to peripheral areas. Local environmental change indirectly shapes the transition by influencing technology adoption. In particular, a supportive policy framework and a robust industrial base promote the transition by facilitating adoption, whereas rising market demand currently hinders both. As peripheral areas emerge as key agricultural zones, local government initiatives and accumulated agrarian knowledge have effectively supported technology adoption and regional agricultural transition. Given China's current stage of socio-economic development, rising market demand may intensify market segmentation, competitive pressures, and income inequality, thereby hindering the transition. In response, government regulation can complement green production markets by fostering technology adoption and enhancing regional coordination.

Climate change and population growth present significant challenges to global food security, underscoring the critical importance of sustainable and efficient agricultural production. Crop rotation is a key agricultural practice that enhances food production, improves soil fertility, reduces pest and disease pressure, and maintains agro-ecological balance. The complexity and diversity of cropping patterns, particularly in the fragmented farmland of southern China, limit the availability of high-resolution crop rotation maps in precision agriculture. To improve the consistency between cropping intensity (CI) estimation and crop pattern (CP) mapping, this study developed a hierarchical framework for extracting cropland, CI, and CP from remotely sensed images. Using the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, a 10-m binary cropland/non-cropland map was first generated from the time-series Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Then, CI was derived within cropland regions using an intelligent algorithm that counts the number of growth cycles. Finally, taking advantage of crop phenology and CI constraints, nine cropping patterns were extracted from a diversified cropping region. Comparing with field survey data, the results revealed overall accuracies of 98.97%, 96.47%, and 87.92% for the cropland/non-cropland map, cropping intensity map, and cropping pattern map, respectively. These findings demonstrate the reliability of the generated maps and the potential of the proposed framework for revealing diverse cropping patterns in complex cropping regions.

Reducing fertilizer and pesticide use is a crucial path for the green transformation of agricultural production, which has garnered sustained attention in research on sustainable agricultural development. Based on the theoretical analysis, this article analyzes the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of fertilizer and pesticide usage intensity (FUI and PUI) in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) over the past 20 years and uses a Two-Way Fixed Effects Model to test their impacts and mechanisms. Findings show that agricultural development in the YRD shows a pattern of specialization and intensification with a significant north–south divide, with zero growth and reduction in fertilizer and pesticide use across the region from 2010 to 2015, but the current FUI and PUI are still nearly three and five times higher than the global average. Over the past 20 years, the FUI is high in the north and low in the south, high in the plains and low in mountainous-hilly areas, and high in suburban areas and low in remote counties. Adversely, the PUI is high in the south and low in the north, high in mountainous-hilly areas and low in plains, and high in suburban areas and low in remote counties. The FUI and PUI of characteristic agricultural areas of fruit, tea, and forestry in southern Anhui and southwestern Zhejiang, as well as the agroecological and facility agriculture clusters in southern Jiangsu and the suburbs of Shanghai, have approached the peak and successfully moved into the new green development stage earlier compared to other areas. In contrast, the grain and oil production plains areas along the Yangtze River, the coast, in northern Anhui, and in northern Jiangsu are relatively lagging behind. The combination of soil, water, light, and heat resource conditions and modes of agriculture production shape the absolute figures of FUI and PUI, and factors such as the level of local economic development and public fiscal expenditure significantly influence the trajectories of spatiotemporal differentiation in the progress of reducing fertilizer and pesticide in the YRD.

Exploring the relationship between the economy and the ecosystems in China could not only be beneficial for achieving the harmonious coexistence between humans and nature but also offer scientific references for the international society. This study aimed to elucidate the long-term ecological–economic relationship in China from the symbiotic perspective of ecosystem services value (ESV) and gross domestic product (GDP). On the basis of multiple datasets, yearly ESV maps from 1990 to 2020 were first produced using unit value method. Employing the Lotka–Volterra (L–V) symbiosis model and Bivariate Local Moran’s I, the coordination and proximity relationships between GDP and ESV at the provincial level were then investigated. The results revealed that the overall ecological–economic relationship for the study area is predator–prey (ESV–GDP), indicating that ecological conservation and restoration have been prioritized over economic development in China, while, at the provincial level, 3 provinces follow a traditional economic development path that sacrifices ecosystem health. The research findings revealed the hotspots for ecological security in China. The implications for the international society were further discussed, including the potential application of the L–V symbiosis model in government performance evaluation, inclusive policies on ecological conservation and economic development in the developing countries, as well as a long-term dynamic perspective on ecological–economic relationship.

Optimizing the spatial allocation of urban construction land (UCL) from the national perspective and promoting its moderate concentration are imperative prerequisites for synergistically accomplishing economic growth and carbon emission reduction goals. However, how the concentration of spatial allocation of urban construction land (CSA) across cities influences carbon emission intensity (CEI) remains unclear. To bridge this knowledge gap, we investigated the impact of CSA on CEI in 282 cities in China by using multi-source panel data (e.g., urban carbon emissions data, construction land area data, and socio-economic data) from 2005 to 2020 and applying econometric models: fixed effect model, mediating effect model, and spatial Durbin model. The results revealed that CSA exhibited a significant and robust U-shaped effect on CEI. During the study period, the proportion of cities crossing the inflection point slightly decreased from 57.80 % in 2005 to 55.67 % in 2020, and their spatial distribution pattern remained relatively stable. It is predicted that this proportion will drop to 53.90 % in 2030, and the average CEI of these cities will decrease by 67.93 % from 2005 to 2030. In this scenario, China’s carbon emission reduction target for 2030 can be attained in the sampled cities. The heterogeneity analysis showed that the impact of CSA on CEI followed a U-shaped pattern in both the developed and developing regions, as well as in the eastern, central and western regions. Additionally, the analysis revealed a similar pattern in both the resource- and non-resource-based cities. Conversely, this impact was significantly positive in the northeastern region. The mediating effect analysis suggested that CSA indirectly influenced CEI through economic agglomeration (EA), technological innovation (TI), and industrial structure upgrading (ISU). The spatial spillover effect analysis demonstrated that CSA exerted a U-shaped effect on CEI in neighboring regions through the spatial spillover effect. The geographical extent of this effect depends on the geographical distance between cities and their gross domestic product per capita. These findings provide reference values for the spatial allocation and scale control of UCL, and carbon reduction in countries whose UCL allocation and land planning are primarily controlled by the government.

Understanding the evolution of the rural-urban interface (RUI) and its dynamic ecological consequences is of great theoretical and practical significance for urban-rural integration and management. In this study, Nanjing is taken as an example, and the evolution of the RUI in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020 and its effects on the ecological landscape structure and function are investigated. We first developed a discriminant matrix to identify the RUI during different periods based on land use maps and nighttime light data. The response of ecological landscape structure and function to the RUI evolution was analyzed using landscape metrics and ecosystem services value (ESV). The results show that the RUI experienced significant inter-transfer with rural and urban areas, and three evolution patterns were concluded, i.e., edge developing, rural industrializing, and outlying. The evolution of the RUI has led to landscape fragmentation and enhanced ecological land connectivity at the city scale. At the community/village scale, the shape of farmland became more regular with the evolution of the RUI. The transformation from rural to RUI and the maintenance of RUI would increase landscape fragmentation, richness, and the intertwining of artificial and natural land. The overall ecological function in terms of ESV usually decreased with the evolution of the RUI, except when the area of ecological land increased significantly. We believe that urban expansion, planning and protection policies, and industrial orientations are major factors facilitating the impacts of the RUI evolution on ecological landscape structure and function. At last, we gave suggestions of landscape management approaches and ecosystem services trade-off/synergy for the improvement of ecological landscape structure and function.

For a long time,due to lack of accurate data covering large areas,it is difficult to capture the continuous spatial evolutionary trajectory of rural settlements shaped by rapid urbanization and rural land use policies.To fill this gap,based on theoretical analysis this paper systemically detected the changing characteristics of scale,spatial morphology,dis-tribution,and land use pattern of rural settlements in Southern Jiangsu in the past 20 years depending on the data of land resource survey in 2009 and 2019.The study suggests that the total area and per capita size of rural settlements declined by 30％and 2％respectively as a result of rural land consolidation and the influx of enormous immigrants from underdeveloped regions.The spatial density and average shape index dropped by 14％and 44％respectively in the recent decade,indicating an evident trend of decentralization in spatial distribution,and regularization in the spatial morphology.Furthermore,residential land within rural settlements decreased by 33％over the past decade while the land for industry and commercial service steadily increased,demonstrating that the function for manufacturing and diversified services had been strengthened.Considering the emerging issue of the aging population and new business opportunities in rural Southern Jiangsu,rural settlements regeneration might be the focus of future research.

The supply-demand relationship between urban parks and residents is a hot topic for promoting sustainable and efficient cities. Most studies have focused on the assessment of spatial equity, while ignoring the evaluation of park use efficiency. Taking Nanjing as an example, we developed specific indicators, namely, the supply intensity of urban park (UPSI), UPSI ), per capita park area (PCPA), PCPA ), usage ratio (UR), UR ), and demand satisfaction ratio (DSR), DSR ), to measure equity and efficiency on the basis mobile phone signalling data. The results show that the service areas of urban parks cover only approximately 4/5 of the urban residences, and that the PCPAs s of urban residences were divergent. In addition, most urban parks had unsuitable UR s, and the DSRs s indicated that most residents' demand could not be satisfied by the surrounding parks. A spatial lag model (SLM) was introduced to explore the factors influencing residents' demand. In combination with the literature, we concluded that the disparity between urban park supply and resident demand resulted from the spatial distribution of physical geographic factors, changes in urban planning and development strategies, and the diverse and dynamic demands of urban residents. On the basis of the above results, we further made recommendations for the management and planning of urban parks.

Innovation is perceived as a crucial tool for addressing the serious global challenges faced by the agriculture sector. This paper focuses on a new local public agricultural innovation project in the context of rural China, and intends to capture the embodied agricultural innovation and dissemination network for modernizing the smallholders. Through integrating the concepts of Agricultural Innovation System and Agricultural Innovation Governance, we develop a comprehensive framework for understanding the partnerships between agritechnicians and small farmers within the network structured by innovation governance practices. In-depth interview and network analysis methods were used to scrutinize the linkages among actors engaged with the agricultural innovation programme in case area and detect the achievements in enabling smallholders to upgrade technical trajectories in production and fostering modern farmers at the local levels. Our empirical analysis suggests that the single-center and multi-level network produced in the agricultural innovation practices, which is distinctive to the previous simplistic linear model for technology transfer, demonstrates obvious effectiveness in diffusing the new knowledge both vertically and horizontally, and that the grassroots sub-network generates the interaction space between agronomic experts and farmers for building mutual trust and co-producing technologies suitable for local conditions. Through allocating financial resources and supervising the public agricultural innovation projects, the provincial government indirectly dominates the directionality of local agricultural innovation for enabling smallholders to learn emerging technologies and cultivating the new generation of professional farmers. Nevertheless, the current agricultural innovation practice in case area has not completely avoided the social selection bias due to the clear marginalization of some vulnerable smallholders, and the duration of innovation projects imposed negative influence on the persistent collaborations between agritechnicians and smallholders in places. It is argued that for meeting the national agenda of agricultural modernization and common prosperity in rural area, how to reform the management measures of public innovation projects and enable the vulnerable farmers to equally engage with the innovation activities and share the interests brought by new technologies are the urgent challenges need to be addressed in the future.

The dual-path model of industrial evolution and spatial progression has been widely acknowledged and incorporated into the strategic planning to promote the development of urban industries and regional collaborations. However, current research on inter-enterprise city networks mainly focuses on the single sector of flows on all enterprise branches, such as product value chains and production factors, but neglects that of particular industry department. Built upon the new economic geography and city networks theory, this paper develops a methodological framework that focuses on the analysis of city network evolution characteristics of smart industry. Particularly, a conceptual model of smart industry enterprise-industry-city is proposed and then applied to a case study of smart industry in the Yangtze River Delta Region, China. Using enterprise supplier-customer data, a city network of smart industry is constructed and subsequently analyzed with the proposed model. Findings indicate that the smart industry network in Yangtze River Delta Region exhibits a hierarchical structure and the expansion of the network presents a small-world network characteristic. The study not only makes a methodological contribution for revealing the industrial and spatial evolution path of the current smart industry, but also provides empirical support for the formulation of new economic development policies focused on smart industries, demonstrating the role of city clusters as carriers of regional synergistic development.

The urbanrural interface is the frontier of urban expansion and rural development. Understanding the differentiation and driving mechanism of the urbanrural interface could help policy-makers mitigate negative impacts of development and promote integration through proper planning. Taking Nanjing as an example, this study provides new insights into the different types of urbanrural interfaces and what drives their. differentiation. We first built a conceptual framework to hypothesize how the urbanrural interface was differentiated. Based on multiple datasets, a two-step classification method (random forest model and k-medoids) and the multinomial logistic regression (MLR) model were then introduced to identify different urbanrural interfaces and explore influencing factors, respectively. The results show that 341 communities/villages were identified as belonging to the urbanrural interface, with 37 communities/villages as urban-dominant, 128 communities/villages as intertwined, and 176 communities/villages as rural-dominant. Most mean values of land use, demographic, and socioeconomic characteristics decreased sequentially from urbandominant to intertwined and rural-dominant interfaces. MLR results indicated that transportation and economy were common drivers, while policy orientation, planning, and location accounted for the different urbanrural interfaces. In combination with the conceptual framework and additional investigations, this study concluded the driving mechanism of urban-rural interface differentiation in Nanjing. Specifically, the development of urban-dominant interface was mainly promoted by local governments; the development of intertwined interface was usually driven by complicated factors with the involvement of many stakeholders; policies facilitated by central/regional government accounted more for the development of rural-dominant interface. With the above analysis, this study further discussed the relationship between the urbanrural interface and planning system, and proposed differential development and management suggestions for the urban-rural interface.

The green transformation in agricultural production is an important research topic in the field of agricultural sustainable development.Based on the concept of agricultural green de-velopment and theoretical analysis in terms of the transformation path,this paper aims to exam-ine the major processes of the agricultural green development practices and assess the effects in reducing chemical products input and increasing agricultural output within the Yangtze River Economic Belt(YREB)in the past 20 years in combination of the methods of literature investi-gation,semi-structural interviews,questionnaire analysis and decoupling analysis.The results show that since 2015 the provincial-level regions within the YREB issued a set of policies relat-ed to the agricultural green development actions,which encouraged the farmers to replace the traditional chemical fertilizer with alternative and organic fertilizer,prevent and control the dev-astations caused by the diseases,insects and herbs with ecological measures,and reuse the agri-cultural residues in order to reduce the consumption of chemical fertilizer and pesticides and herbicides in agricultural production.Compared to the other regions in China,the YREB has a five-year lead in terms of achieving the great aims of zero growth and reduction of pesticide and chemical fertilizer use in agricultural production.Nevertheless,the current chemical fertil-izer and pesticide usage intensity in the YREB is still more than two times the international av-erage level.Although the chemical fertilizer and pesticide usage intensity in the downstream ar-eas of the Yangtze River is much higher than that in the upstream areas due to the differentia-tion in terms of multiple crop index and agricultural output density,the chemical fertilizer and pesticide usage intensity appears to gradually disconnect with the multiple crop index and agri-cultural output density because of the wide application of new technologies for agricultural green development.However,the ongoing agricultural green development agenda within the studu area still faces challenges,including the rising costs in upgrading the production technolo-gy and agricultural machinery and equipment and the severe difficulty in overcoming ageing is-sues and introducing or fostering young talents in agricultural sector.

The accelerated urbanization process has been considered to be the root cause of increasingly severe energy consumption growth in China. However, energy is still an essential factor for the urbanization process, so arbitrarily mitigating energy use currently will unquestionably slow down the urbanization process. The principal contribution of this paper is to comprehensively analyze the dynamic interaction mechanism between the new-type urbanization and energy consumption, and further put forward a new idea of comparing the benefit of an increase in the level of new-type urbanization resulting from energy consumption and the negative externality of environmental damage related with energy consumption. This paper conducts an empirical study on the causal relationship between new-type urbanization and energy consumption using Chinese provincial administrative units from 1999 to 2020. And we find that new-type urbanization leads to energy consumption negatively and energy consumption leads to new-type urbanization positively for provinces in the eastern region. There is only a one-way effect of energy consumption on new-type urbanization for provinces in the central and northeastern regions, and there is negative feedback causality for provinces in the western region. Additionally, the benefit of an increase in the level of new-type urbanization resulting from energy consumption is larger than the negative externality of environmental damage related to energy consumption for provinces in the eastern, central, and northeastern regions, yet it is totally opposite for provinces in the western region. Finally, we propose some fruitful policy recommendations to construct new-type urbanization under the background of clear reduction targets for energy consumption in China.

The continuous development of agricultural technologies and produces trade and updated state reforms strongly shape the dominant organizing styles of local agriculture production. Since the end of the 1970s, rural China has witnessed a drastic agriculture transformation featured by de-collectivization, and recently in Taicang, a developed city in the eastern China, a kind of new cooperative farms have replaced the smallholders by pooling households' contracted farmland, signaling a new shift tendency towards agriculture recollectivization that is distinctive compared to other countries. Given the state governance's leadership in promoting this latest transformation, drawing on the theoretical concept of 'governmentality' that is powerful in understanding how to govern the society to meet certain objectives, this paper examines the accurate processes of agriculture re-collectivization in Taicang City based on the methods of semi-structured interview and participant observation. Our research shows that the China's tax-sharing and relevant reforms in the 1990s framed a new governance structure in line with the new mode of 'governmentality' closely linked to 'advanced liberalism', creating the responsibility shift from central to local governments and a set of evaluation technologies, and guiding various actors to engage in the agriculture re-collectivization practice in Taicang. Importantly, the considerable subsidies and the impressive extension services in terms of farming personnel training and agricultural techniques diffusion underpin the normal running of cooperative farms and contribute to the local implementation of national strategy of agriculture modernization. We argue that the combination of distinctive institutional arrangement of rural land owned by village collectives in China and the burgeoning local economy allows the developed areas to re-collectivizing the agriculture production for ensuring grain self-sufficiency rather than capturing more share in global agriculture products trade, and that the cooperative farms in our case have been deeply integrated into the 'modern procurement system' and become more sensitive to market fluctuation, requiring rural extension service to transform towards farms' capacity building for maintaining the long-term development momentum.

Researchers are paying increasing attention to issues of rural transformation. Exogenous and endogenous have been conventionally recognized as the mainstream paradigms of rural development. Drawing upon an ethnographic study in a traditional village in southern Jiangsu Province (Sunan), this article attempts to introduce a new panacea beyond the development dichotomy and analyze the multi-scalar process of rural revitalization in China. Foremost, findings reveals that the recession of traditional rural communities can be partially, if not all, attributed to the mismatch between local endowments and selected paths of development. Second, a successful path of rural development should be two-directional, which needs to look both inwards to mobilize local actors and outwards to ‘sell’ the territory to both nonlocal consumers and upper-level policymakers. Third, third-party bodies tend to serve as advocates and activists in the downscaling process of locality mobilization, and as promoters and mediators in the upscaling process of place-marketing. These results offer insight for subsequent research on rural revitalization and rural governance.

The new targets of carbon emission reduction make China slumps into a development dilemma, and luckily the Chinese Government has been determined to take new urbanization path. Based on Chinese provincial panel data, this paper adopts spatial econometric techniques to analyze the effects of new urbanization on CO2 emissions in view of the geographical correlations. The results suggest that: (1) Chinese provincial CO2 emissions display significant positive autocorrelation, and specifically most provinces present significant High-High clustered characters, whereas some provinces present significant Low-Low clustered characters; (2) The level of new urbanization promotes CO2 emissions within local provinces and also exerts positive impact for neighboring provinces; (3) The inverted U-shaped relationship between new urbanization and CO2 emissions denotes that there exists a threshold effect, and the average level of new urbanization hasn't yet exceeded its threshold at present; (4) The average level of new urbanization in eastern China may have exceeded its threshold, whereas it's is far from its threshold in central China, and new urbanization promotes CO2 emissions only monotonically in western China. Overall, these conclusions illustrate that China should spare no effort to take the new urbanization path.

Rural China has undergone dramatic socioeconomic and spatial restructuring as a result of rapid urbanization and the implementation of a series of top-down reforms. In this paper, based on the actor-network perspective, we examine the actor translation process associated with implementation of various governmental strategies in Haoqiao, a poor village located in the northern Jiangsu Province in China. We mainly focus on interactions between participants as well as their influences on the rural restructuring process. The findings proved the crucial role of township government in implementing restructuring at village-level. Motivated by acquisition of land-related finance, the performance evaluation system of local officials, and public accountability, the town government is keen to mobilize others in the action coalition promoting rural restructuring. However, it is noteworthy that many farming households are reluctant to comply with community planning, because they have to cover large price gap between their old houses and residential land and new houses for resettlement. We also discuss the motivations for diverse human actors and the potentially negative impacts that domestic macroeconomic situation plays on the circulation of rural residential land consolidation which mainly underpin the rural restructuring.