De Tong

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Peking University

Since the 1970s, an inclusive slum upgrading strategy focused on perceived neighbourhood environment enhancement has gained prominence in the Global South. In China, recent years have witnessed a new inclusive instance of informal housing governance, namely retrofitting urbanising villages, which focuses on both housing characteristics and neighbou...

Human mobility modelling has attracted scholarly attention from physics-based methods and social science explanatory approaches. However, there is limited knowledge of the nonlinear relationship of flows and distance in intercity mobility and regional differences in the nonlinear relationship. Focusing on China’s long-distance and large-scale mobil...

This paper focuses on a new model of land readjustment integrated with shareholding in Zhaoqing, China. It determines whether this innovation reduces transaction costs throughout the land development process. To cope with the uncertainty during rapid urbanization in peripheral areas, shareholding land readjustment provides opportunities for the ori...

As the knowledge economy has characterized this era, the intentions of skilled migrants to settle have drawn increasing scholarly attention. In the literature, the role of economic incentives, urban amenities, and political factors has usually been considered to drive talent migration, but little attention has been given to its social driver. Throu...

Urban agglomeration, the trend and main carrier of future urbanization in the world, plays an important role in integrating regional resources and promoting economic growth. In particular, in some countries, urban agglomeration has become a policy tool for high-quality urbanization. However, does urban agglomeration play an equally positive role in...

Public facilities capitalization of formal housing has been widely discussed. However, how residents of informal housing value facilities and how they differ from formal housing remain unclear. We employ hedonic model and the gradient boosting decision trees approach to address the gap by identifying the differences between small property rights ho...

A growing appreciation of the potential benefits of experimentation to tame the complexities of urban transformation has led to an increase in related research activity. Building on a “practice-to-policy” experimentation-based framework, this paper investigates the adaptive policymaking process for urban regeneration in Shenzhen since the 2000s. It...

In this paper, the link between land finance and urban expansion in China is premised on a conceptual framework emphasizing the distinct role played by local regimes of capital accumulation. Using a fixed effect model, a 2SLS model, a spatial panel model, and threshold models, we examine the relationship between land finance and urban expansion bas...

The rise of e-commerce is changing consumer behaviours and the value of retail space. Tracking the changes of shop rents under the impact of e-commerce and understanding the logic behind those changes is important for urban management. By identifying the factors that reflect the impacts of e-commerce and applying the Pearson correlation coefficient...

Since the 1990 s, the restructuring of the global economic system has ushered in worldwide ‘post-productivist transitions’ (PPTs) and triggered development in rural areas and agricultural adjustments for meeting the requirements of urban populations to consume ‘rurality’. While adaptive development of rural areas has occurred in Western countries,...

In recent decades developing nations have witnessed rapid urbanization with a massive inflow of rural migrants into their cities, creating large areas of informal settlements. However, city administrators have begun the regeneration of informal settlements resulting in gentrification and the involuntary resettlement of the informal settlement resid...

China’s collective landownership was created by the revolutionary land reform in the early 1950s. Economic reforms since the early 1980s have dismantled the collective farming, but the collective landownership remains unchanged. Nonagricultural economies have manifested collective land rent in the dynamic urbanizing regions. The rural collective vi...

Urbanization has led to the expansive conversion of farmland to non-agricultural human settlements. Over the past decades, the rural New Territories in Hong Kong have experienced significant land use changes where agricultural land has become sites for industrial operations (known as brownfields in Hong Kong). This includes open storage for industr...

Nowadays, cities meet numerous sustainable development challenges in facing growing urban populations and expanding urban areas. The monitoring and simulation of land use and land-cover change have become essential tools for understanding and managing urbanization. This paper interprets and predicts the expansion of seven different land use types i...

Understanding land use change patterns of rural town settlements (RTSs) is crucial for rural and small-town planning; however, few studies have explored pattern mining approaches to RTS trajectory analysis. In this study, we adopted a novel method by building sequence alignment method (SAM) to detect representative trajectory clusters of land use c...

Urban expansion is commonly attributed to market-oriented forces, while public finance factors connected to government forces, especially land finance, in China’s institutional environment, can provide a more interesting explanation. Using a fixed-effect threshold model, the relationships of land finance and differing local fiscal pressures to urba...

In this study, we focus on the quality of street space which has attracted high attentions. We discover associations between the quality of street space and built environment attributes through an ordered logistic model using massive street view pictures (SVPs) and data on street location, form, function and attributes. Before ascertain which built...

Since 2008, the urban redevelopment in China has entered a new era mainly characterised by the new redevelopment model proposed and practised in Guangdong province. In the new wave of urban redevelopment towards a more inclusive type of governance, the roles of various agents or stakeholders in the decision-making processes have changed correspondi...

The ‘urbanising village’ is a uniquely Chinese urban form that emerged during the period of rapid urbanisation in the reform era. The absence of state governance in rural areas relegates considerable decision-making power to village collectives, and the social capital inherited from traditional rural villages may remain in place after villages are...

The rate of land urbanization has grown rapidly in recent decades in China, and a growing body of literature has investigated the driving forces behind it. The dual nature of China’s land ownership system, in which top-down and bottom-up land development form two separate tracks, is frequently cited in these studies. While top-down land development...

An urban agriculture park (UAP) is a mixture of various kinds of urban agriculture and has a group of administrators to plan and manage its landscapes. Thus, the relationships between users and the ability of the UAPs to provide services are crucial. This study investigated the user profiles of three kinds of UAPs in Beijing, China. Investigation o...

In countries where public land leasing systems exist, government lessors have faced strong resistance on the part of lessees to charging fees to renew extended-term land leases. Many scholars have argued that this outcome is largely due to politics, i.e., not wanting to alienate constituents. In this paper, we look deeper into this issue guided by...

Rural to urban migrants are the dominant component of population growth in China’s coastal cities. China’s unique household registration system has excluded migrants from most public housing, resulting in pronounced housing segregation –a social phenomenon that has come to be China’s greatest urban social planning challenge. In this paper, we analy...

Urban informality and informal settlements, as research concepts rooted in the global south, have the potential to reveal the relationship between property improvement, tenure security, uneven distribution of resources and asymmetric power relations embedded in urban studies. Investigations of urban villages in China are also inspired by these idea...

Public medical service facilities are among the most basic needs of the public and are directly related to residents’ health. The balanced development of medical service facilities is of great significance. Public medical service facilities can be divided into different levels according to their medical equipment, service catchment, and medical qua...

The ways in which urban rail transit influences land development have been extensively studied for cities in the United States and Europe; studies from less-developed countries are limited. However, the influences of rail transit on land development in developing countries such as China have drawn much scholarly attention in recent years, in part d...

The conversion of rural land to urban land, known as land urbanization or urban expansion, often follows two tracks in China: 1) the government becomes the owner of the land through land expropriation and performs primary land development and land transfer; 2) villagers maintain their ownership of the land collectively and convert their non-constru...

With the aid of spatial lag model, the influence mechanism of spatial factors around public bicycle stations (PBS) is examined at the research scope of 500 m buffer zone of 363 PBS, based on the trip data from the public bicycle system in Nanshan District of Shenzhen. Factors are selected including the location of PBS, surrounding public transporta...

China's open-door policy and rapid urbanization have been accompanied by an unprecedented economic growth rate and an expanding regional inequality problem. Which factors affect the regional inequality? Will it get worse? What policy measures should be taken to offset these adverse effects? Based on the Lorenz curve and a core-periphery (C-P) setti...

Land development results from a combination of many natural and social drivers. In China, the system of dual land ownership, in which lands are owned either by the state or by a collective, is a unique factor that affects land development, especially during the urbanization process as collective-owned rural land at the urban fringe is rapidly devel...

In traditional urban geography, city contact research is a classic study element in city research. In general, researchers use the traditional gravity model to characterize the contacts that exist between two cities. The traditional gravity model assumes ideal conditions, but these preconditions and their results often do not exist in realistic con...

Connectivity is an important aspect of the landscape pattern on influencing function and services. This paper analyzes the dynamics of urban green connectivity of Shenzhen, China, from years 1986-2010 and examines the temperature regulation function, based on remote sensing and a field survey. The connectivity degree of urban green was classified a...

In the rush for modernization, many of the Chinese cities are in the abrupt disappearance of character and identity of the unique places. Urban open space has lost its sense of place. This paper analyzes the applicability of group form theory within today’s dynamic environment by taking Maki’s Hillside Terrace complex as an example. The development...

Studies on the characteristics of urban villages have attracted much interest in urban geography. However, how to advance the development of further theoretical analysis and quantitative methodologies, especially in the era that GIS and digital-urban technologies develop rapidly and provide precious resources on spatial issues, has always been a he...

Tourists investigation is the foundation and basis of tourism planning. It is particularly crucial to understand tourists’ demand in the planning and development of National Forest Park because of its eco-tour attributes. Through several respects such as tourist’s behavior analysis, appraisal of scenic spot, travel arrangement and consumption, opin...