Deng Chen

Urban-rural equalized development (URED) is recognized as strongly contributing to the narrowing of societal, economic, life, and environmental gaps between urban and rural areas and is also an effective way to solve the “three rural issues” of rapid industrialization and urbanization in China. This paper explores the spatio-temporal patterns of URED in the state-designated experimental zone of Chengdu at a county level by using quantitative survey data from 2004 to 2013. The major findings are as follows: (1) the regions that are closer to the central city of Chengdu had a more optimistic urban-rural equalized development outlook (i.e., the three-tier geographical distribution phenomenon); (2) this distribution characteristic was gradually broken up in the process of urban and rural integration, and the differences between the three tiers has been narrowing; and (3) the gap between urban and rural areas has been significantly improved and exhibited a higher dynamic degree in the second and third tiers than in the first tier, which suggests a new development mode that exhibits better quality and higher sustainability. Given these results, the development orientation and strategy of each tier are discussed according to the characteristics of urban and rural equalized development.

Hubei Province is the hub of communications in central China, which directly determines its strategic position in the country’s development. Additionally, Hubei Province is well-known for its diverse landforms, including mountains, hills, mounds and plains. This area is called “The Province of Thousand Lakes” due to the abundance of water resources. Geographical names are exclusive names given to physical or anthropogenic geographic entities at specific spatial locations and are important signs by which humans understand natural and human activities. In this study, geographic information systems (GIS) technology is adopted to establish a geodatabase of geographical names with particular characteristics in Hubei Province and extract certain geomorphologic and environmental factors. We carry out landscape analysis of mountain-related geographical names and water-related geographical names respectively. In the end, we calculate the information entropy of geographical names of each county to describe the diversity and inhomogeneity of place names in Hubei province. Our study demonstrates that geographical names represent responses to the cultural landscape and physical environment. The geographical names are more interesting in specific landscapes, such as mountains and rivers.