Published paper – Cheng Sun

November 26, 2021December 10, 2022

Enclave-reinforced inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from university campus lockdowns in Wuhan, China

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted urban life and created spatial and social inequalities in cities. The impacts of lifting full lockdown restrictions once fast-spreading and community-acquired infection waves were under control are still not fully understood.

Two phases shape the new inequality during the pandemic.

This study aims to explore spatial inequality reinforced in the intervals between the waves of infection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Enclave-reinforced inequality resulting from enclave-based lockdown policies in Chinese cities was investigated through an analysis of the impacts of university campus enclave closures on the accessibility and crowdedness of urban green spaces. Using a modified two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) and inversed 2SFCA (i2SFCA) method, accessibility and crowdedness were calculated and compared under two different scenarios. Additionally, the Lorenz curve, Gini coefficient, and Theil index were used to measure and compare intra-city global and local inequalities under each scenario.

June 5, 2019November 27, 2020

Comprehensive accessibility evaluation and commuting development of intercity railway in Wuhan

The multi-modal public transport network has been a new trend in modern intra-urban transport. This study aims to comprehensively analyze the three types of accessibility, which are analyzed based on the urban road network, the metro network, and intercity railways in Wuhan.

The shortest-path model and average accessibility method were applied for this purpose. We describe the comprehensive accessibility and spatial difference in Wuhan, and evaluate the spatial patterns of accessibility in different transport network models. In particular, analysis of accessibility changes before and after intercity railway construction, and identify which areas are likely to improve from accessibility and traffic conditions. Furthermore, the correlation is evaluated by considering comprehensive accessibility population and regional gross domestic product to investigate the influence of urban internal traffic.

September 1, 2018January 31, 2019

Gated university campus and its implications for socio-spatial inequality: evidence from students’ accessibility to local public transport

Rapid urbanization has led to a massive transformation of urban space in China, spatially and socially. Its higher education has been growing much faster than ever before, along with an explosive increase of university students’ population. Different from the Western universities, a majority of Chinese university students are required to reside in gated campuses. Their accessibilities to public transport and subsequent spatial and social implications have been neglected in the literature.

Taking Wuhan city as a case study, this paper aims to examine the public transport service to gated university campuses and its impacts on spatial and social inequalities. The spatial accessibility is measured by four methods: proximity-based, gravity-based, population-weighted average, and competition-based, using population data at residential building level.

July 25, 2018

The analysis of low-income people’s park green space accessibility based on 2SFCA in Wuhan

City park green space provide a free stage for low-income people who have low shopping and entertainment facilities consumption ability to rest, communicate and play, satisfying people’s spiritual and cultural needs.

Treating Wuhan city park green space as the research object, the paper uses the 2-Step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) to calculate the park green space accessibility based on walking, bicycle, and public transport. The Pearson correlation coefficient and Lorenz curve and the method of location entropy are used to analyze the matching degree and spatial matching pattern between park green space and low-income population spatial distribution.

Continue reading “The analysis of low-income people’s park green space accessibility based on 2SFCA in Wuhan”

July 25, 2018January 31, 2019

Centrality of public transportation network and its coupling with bank branches distribution in Wuhan City

Urban public transportation is an indispensable part of urban life and an important topic in today’s urban geography research. Existing studies on public transportation mainly focused on the characteristics of network structure and topology. Centrality is one of the important properties of a public transportation network and is widely examined both in theoretical and empirical studies. Centrality can be effectively calibrated by Multiple Centrality Assessment Model (MCA), which is composed of multiple measures such as closeness, betweenness, and straightness. In recent years, researchers began to focus increasingly more on the study of the relationship between public transportation network and social and economic activities. As the most important financial intermediary in the city, banks and the distribution of their branches are closely related to the efficiency of people’s financial activities.

Thus, we investigate the spatial pattern of public transportation network centrality and its coupling with bank branches in Wuhan City. First, this study builds a dataset consisting of public transportation and bank branches in Wuhan urban development zone of 2015 in ArcGIS. Based on the characteristics of the data, this study improves the Multiple Centrality Assessment Model for better accuracy. It then examines the geography of three centrality indices by improved Multiple Centrality Assessment Model and analyzes the centrality of Wuhan public transportation network and its spatial correlation with bank network layout by using kernel density estimation and bivariate spatial autocorrelation model based on GeoDa.