Shenjing He

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at The University of Hong Kong

Outdoor recreational spaces (ORSs) are essential for promoting urban residents' wellbeing and developing resilient and healthy communities. However, a nuanced understanding of the risks and risk factors associated with airborne respiratory infectious diseases in the environments surrounding various types of ORSs is lacking. This leaves an uncharted...

This editorial introduction aims to frame the special issue entitled “Rural-urban interfaces and changing forms of relational and planetary rurality”. Problematising the dominant planetary urbanisation thesis, particularly its tendency in eliding alternative spaces, subjectivities, and politics to the global expansion of capitalist urban fabrics, t...

In Hong Kong, a global metropolis with a vast countryside occupying about 60% of land use, "de-ruralization" in terms of depopulation and marginalisation of rural villages has started since the 1960s. Nonetheless, it does not necessarily lead to the vanishment of rurality. On the contrary, rural spaces have been (re)appropriated and (re) imagined t...

Amid the escalating rural gentrification, a diverse array of gentrifiers is precipitating the path from coexistence and cooperation to conflict and eventual displacement. Existing literature has primarily addressed gentrifiers as a homogeneous group and focuses on the displacement of indigenous villagers, while the staged interdependencies and the...

China has recently witnessed the rise of long-term rental apartments (LRAs) developed by institutional investors, following various state interventions to promote the institutionalization and financialization of the rental housing sector. As many LRAs are converted and renovated from underused properties, such as industrial buildings, they have bec...

基于互联网地图服务测算人才住房, 经济适用房, 公共租赁房在步行, 公共交通和驾车 3 种出行方式下到达不同等级医院的通勤时间, 通过引入高斯距离衰减函数, 设立多级搜索半径, 考虑供给和需求方竞争效应并利用实时交通大数据改进两步移动搜索法, 对深圳市公共住房居民就医可达性进行多维度评价. 研究发现: 1) 紧急就医情境下 15% 公共住房点驾车 30 min 内不可抵达三甲医院, 普通就医情境下仅 10% 公共住房点实现 15 min 就医目标; 2) 可达性由老经济特区向非经济特区逐渐衰减; 3) 人才住房可达性最优, 其次是经济适用房, 最后是公共租赁房; 4) 公共交通和步行相比于驾车模式下的可达性空间分异更显著.

The governance of informal settlements in China – primarily urban villages – remains a persistent challenge. Recently, some urban village houses have been transformed into long-term rental apartments (LRAs). This highlights a potentially novel approach to addressing the longstanding informality issue, but how the rental market in urban villages has...

It is widely documented that school quality has a capitalization effect on housing prices. However, existing literature has commonly reported a linear relationship between housing sales prices and the academic performance of nearby schools. This study challenges this prevalent understanding by examining how the entrance opportunity as an integral p...

While studies of property rights have long gone beyond the legal-illegal dichotomy, how to quantify the varying degree of property rights remains a challenging task. Focusing on a special type of informal housing—Small Property Right Housing (SPRH) in China, this study examines how planning intervention affects the pricing mechanism of SPRH through...

Addressing health inequality is crucial for fostering healthy city development. However, there is a dearth of literature simultaneously investigating the effects of social deprivation and greenness exposure on mortality risks, as well as how greenness exposure may mitigate the adverse effect of social deprivation on mortality risks from a spatiotem...

The housing experience of international students has attracted increasing academic attention in recent years. Australia’s large international student population is largely reliant on lightly-regulated private rental housing, a market sector subject to extreme turbulence during COVID-19. However, while aspects of Australian student housing stress du...

This study reviews national-level policies regulating cross-border healthcare in mainland China after it acceded to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Policy documents from official websites of the State Council and 19 ministries were screened, from which 487 policy documents were analyzed. WTO's five modes of trade and WHO's six building blocks o...

The association between neighbourhood characteristics and residential relocation is a classic topic in urban studies. In China, where gated communities (GCs) have become a highly popular residential form, how and to what extent residents’ perceptions of GCs affect their relocation intention has not been quantitatively examined. Drawing on a large-s...

Drawing on the Bourdieusian concept of ‘field’ and the theorization of ‘intersectionality’, this paper proposes a concept ‘intersectional field’ to disentangle the complex interrelations between housing and education in China, where they mutually constitute and co-produce yet trouble and counteract with each other, whereby exerting simultaneous exc...

Urban renewal planning and development are vital for enhancing the living quality of city residents. However, such improvement activities are often expensive, time-consuming, and in need of standardization. The convergence of remote sensing technologies, social big data, and artificial intelligence solutions has created unprecedented opportunities...

Hospital size distribution, i.e., the uneven allocation of healthcare resources between hospitals of different size classes, significantly impacts healthcare equality and efficiency and challenges healthcare governance. Yet, its variation is inadequately explained by two prevalent approaches to size distribution – the statistical approach merely wo...

Air pollution has a significant impact on human health and influences housing choices. Existing studies on determinant factors affecting property prices, including air pollution, mainly employed hedonic and spatial regression models that have limitations in capturing non-linear relationships and local interactions. Neglecting the non-linear relatio...

Long-term rental apartments (LRAs) are booming in Chinese megacities in recent years, largely facilitated by various forms of state intervention in the private rental sector. Focusing on the state’s endeavours in promoting LRA development and incorporating it into the affordable rental housing scheme nationwide, this study explores the changing rol...

The COVID-19 pandemic in many senses reconstructs social norms and reshapes social behaviour, which typically assumes a close correlation between mobility with a higher risk of COVID-19 infection. This may intensify the pre-existing discrimination against tenants and widen tenure-based health inequalities. Drawing on an online questionnaire survey...

This paper enriches the understanding of actually existing state entrepreneurialism (SE) through politics of scale, regulatory flexibility, and financialization. The emphasis on "actually existing" uncovers how political discourses are materialized into variegated policy outcomes and territorial politics. The central-local relations and their reinf...

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an outpour of solidarity among residents of neighborhoods around the world. In China, one common form of solidarity was neighborly help provided through gifting/sharing food and daily necessities. Using survey data of 3543 residents in four Chinese cities collected in Spring 2021, we explore the factors associated wi...

This chapter provides an urban political ecology analysis of China’s environmental governance of e-waste cities. Situating e-waste cities’ cyborg urbanisation and e-wastescapes transformations within broader power geometries, it explicates how urban environments, as socio-ecological hybrids, are made, remade, and modified by multiscalar dispositifs...

How urban entrepreneurialism is enacted at the neighbourhood level while connecting with broader urban processes remains insufficiently explored. This study introduces a novel conceptual framework of multiscalar and multidirectional urban entrepreneurialism to examine the governance of gated communities that involves dynamic interactions between th...

The editors of EPA: Economy and Space are delighted to announce that the Ashby prizes for the most innovative papers published in the journal in the calendar year 2022 were awarded to Kun Wang (Guangdong Academy of Sciences), Junxi Qian (University of Hong Kong) and Shenjing He (University of Hong Kong) for their paper ‘Global destruction networks...

近 20 年来，我国逐步形成了市场与政府双轨制的住房供应体系。随着住房市场化改革不断加深，住房可支付性已成为重要的社会问题，影响着居民福祉和社会稳定。由于公共住房覆盖面窄，市场租赁住房成为大部分城市新移民的居住选择。2017 年，国家开始鼓励利用集体土地建设租赁住房，以缓解大城市的住房短缺问题，维持社会稳定。文章从新制度经济学的视角出发，基于产权、交易成本和集体行动理论，以北京首例面向市场的集体土地租赁住房项目为例，揭示了集体土地直接入市的制度转型对于促进租赁住房发展的内在机制和重要意义。研究表明，该项新制度突破了原来国有土地住房建设的垄断地位，有助于提高集体土地使用效能，增加住房供给，平抑市场房价和租金；通过降低交易成本，明晰产权，亦有助于提升村集体和市场主体的参与意愿。此外，集体土地租赁...

Recent urban political ecology (UPE) literature on urban environmentality, drawing on Foucauldian power analytics, sheds important light on how powers in non-coercive, non-sovereign, and diffused forms emerge and produce docile environmental subjects. Meanwhile, much literature on urban environmental politics in the Global South works with an envir...

In the context of the reconfigured state-society relation, Chinese states’ modes of crisis management have profoundly transformed, featuring the state’s greater efforts in reconciling the conflicts among the state machinery of capital accumulation, political stability maintenance and the increasingly diversified societal needs. However, how the loc...

The complex role of healthcare in migration has not been fully understood in existing studies, which are largely limited to the simple examination of migration behaviors associated with the uneven distribution of healthcare services. This study provides a more nuanced understanding by considering the subjective dimension of healthcare quality as an...

Background In response to COVID-19, Southeast Asian (SEA) countries had imposed stringent lockdowns and restrictions to mitigate the pandemic ever since 2019. Because of a gradually boosting vaccination rate along with a strong demand for economic recovery, many governments have shifted the intervention strategy from restrictions to “Living with CO...

Ranci ere's theorisation of police, politics, and aesthetics offers an illustrative framework to understand urban (re)developments. While extant works have examined separately the art of governing through aesthetics and the political subjectivities of those having no part in the frame of visibility and intelligibility, this study argues that hegemo...

Drawing on a critical reflection on the long-lasting debates of rural-urban dichotomy, we argue for a reconceptualisation of the rural that emphasises the ever-evolving and multifaceted nature of rurality to explore alternative pathways of rural revitalisation through non-urban-centric planetary thinking. Instead of viewing the rural and the urban...

The dramatic growth of long-term rental apartments (LRAs) in China's megacities since 2015, spurred by a series of state policies encouraging the development of the private rental sector (PRS), has culminated in many LRA firms encountering capital chain rupture and even going bankrupt within a short period. As a result, thousands of tenants were re...

Under the concurrence of economic liberalization and political domination in post-reform China, a new mode of urban governance emerged, involving market and societal forces under the orchestration of state entrepreneurialism. However, empirical analysis investigating governance practices in urban neighborhoods through the lens of entrepreneurial ur...

Aging in place has become a popular social policy worldwide. This paper argues that well-being is an important outcome of aging in place, upon which older people develop autonomy and environmental proactivity. The temporal dimension of aging in place highlights development of place attachment, which includes place identity and place dependence. The...

Recent studies on healthcare accessibility have made use of medical records to study the actual patient mobility and its implications for healthcare governance. Drawing on 39,067 cross-city healthcare utilization records of Hefei residents in China between 2019 and 2020, this study extends existing research to examine patient mobility at individual...

Submarket segmentation outlines an essential prerequisite for monitoring housing market and formulating urban housing policies. Although examining segmentation based on a posteriori knowledge rather than a priori knowledge becomes the mainstream, it follows a data-driven approach without a solid theoretical foundation and involves subjective interv...

Understanding the dynamic distribution of residents' socioeconomic status (SES) across neighborhoods within cities is essential for urban planning and policy-making aligning to the Sustainable Development Goals 2030. Whereas the promise in explicitly linking geographical features to SES has been highlighted fairly clear in previous works, scholars...

This research combines “big data” and “thick data” approaches to examine the correlation and causation between residential neighborhood features and people’s daily commuting and traveling patterns by integrating two datasets: household survey data and mobile phone data. We focus on “lilong” neighborhoods—a primary form of traditional residential ne...

As a highly sought‐after resource by parents, quality schools exert a strong influence on the housing market and other aspects of social life worldwide. Given the long‐lasting prominence of education in urban society, scholars extensively explored the interplay between education and housing dynamics and their sociospatial implications, among which...

Recent geographical scholarship on the illicit e-waste geographies and e-waste processing hubs in the Global South has shed light on the global mobilities, production/destruction networks, and political economy/ecology of e-waste. However, their views about the reactivation of value in waste and the dialectics between waste and value rest predomina...

Since the 1990s, an emerging form of gated communities (GCs) packaging K‐12 schools with tailor‐made residential services, termed education‐featured gated communities (edu‐featured GCs) by the author, has transformed the residential and education landscapes in Chinese cities. Encapsulating fundamental issues of urban entrepreneurialism, privatisati...

For the roughly 300 million rural migrant workers in China, migrating to urban destinations offers the primary opportunities for poverty alleviation and upward social mobility. However, studies on migration in China, mostly through the lens of the push-pull theory, have left immobile rural residents unexamined. This paper explores how the mobility...

The distributions of different healthcare resources are typically examined individually and separately, thus overlooking the fundamental fact that healthcare delivery hinges on the cofunction of different resources. Divergent distributions of physicians and healthcare beds are found to significantly affect healthcare quality and efficiency, while t...

Previous studies have scrutinised the proliferation of privately governed neighbourhoods and the role of homeowner associations (HOAs) in governing the neighbourhood and residents' conducts in different contexts, while little attention has been paid to individual residents' agency. This research introduces a novel perspective to examine the role of...

The essential role of food environment in achieving urban sustainability has been widely recognized worldwide. A myriad of studies has emphasized food availability as the basic starting point for a comprehensive understanding of urban food environment. However, most of the empirical evidences were based on Western cases, and how urban food availabi...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has left a strong imprint on many aspects of urban life. Gated communities (GCs) in China are less commonly perceived as a negative and segregated urban form of community compared to other contexts, owing to their wide variety and relative openness. Yet, the enhanced security zone function and the popularity of GCs, al...

Informal settlements are often subject to government-led demolitions and clearances. In contemporary China, the removal of such settlements often necessitates negotiations between governments and landlords who are hard to dislocate, as exemplified in ‘Nail Households’ literature, while migrant tenants, if any, can be easily evicted without appropri...

选取新加坡和深圳的3 个城中村作为实证研究对象，从文化身份的理论视角切入，剖析移民城市的城中村更新的文化塑造过程；指出要理解文化身份的内涵与本质，需要理解地方蕴含的全球性与在地性、过去与现在这两组关系。在解读宏观文化政策的内在政治和经济推动力的基础上，基于参与式观察和半结构化访谈资料，运用质性分析方法，比较探讨典型移民城市城中村的更新模式、政策机制及社会影响。结果发现，2 座城市在对待文化身份尤其是移民文化的态度不同，产生了不同的更新效果。新加坡案例以实际生活在此的移民群体的生活方式为出发点塑造地方特色，并提供公屋政策支持，因而能够在发展展示经济的同时保有社区的延续性。深圳案例则是人为选择和指定某个历史时期的建筑风格作为特色加以强调，发展文化旅游经济，这种方式塑造的文化身份与原有社区和住民的...

Current environmental justice (EJ) research is moving beyond the distributional paradigm to embrace frameworks that emphasize the plurality of EJs. This study proposes that actor-network theory (ANT), which foregrounds nonhuman agency and heterogeneous associations, holds great potential for pushing forward this research agenda. It presents an ANT-...

摘要：政治生态学是西方人文政治地理研究人与自然/环境互动的辩证关系的核心领域。城市政治生态学作为政治生态学的衍生分支同样经历了二十年快速的发展，这一领域尚未获得中国人文地理学界的系统关注。本文对西方文献中城市政治生态学的理论发展、研究议题以及近期 前沿的学术争论和理论拓展进行了系统梳理与探讨。政治生态学分析方法批判和克服了技术专家治国论、新马尔萨斯主义、增长的极限等非政治视角的环境生态解释。理论溯源于新马克思主义城市地理学的城市政治生态学，继承了政治生态学的政治视角，但同时对政治生态学和城市研究两个领域中的自然/社会的二元对立提出了批判，以社会-生态混合体为理论出发点，打破并超越了城市-自然的对立和二元划分，通过研究自然的生产、循环与新陈代谢，将城市概念化为动态变化的社会-生态混合体，并揭露...

Homeowner associations (HOAs), the emergent neighborhood-based organizations, spawn new modes of neighborhood governance in post-reform China, meanwhile are profoundly influenced by state power. Aiming to unpack the complexity and hybridity of neighborhood governance, this research presents a detailed examination of how the local state exerts insti...

Transit Oriented Development (TOD), as a widely practiced planning strategy toward urban sustainability, commonly refers to the integration of transport and land use in the form of an integrated transit station area surrounded by compact urban development and high-quality walkable environment. Although policymakers are very enthusiastic about the p...

Customary tenure is inherent to the informal urbanisation process and institutional ambiguity in the developing world. However, factors that influence perceived tenure security remain poorly understood. We develop an analytical framework to understand the constitutive and heterogeneous nature of perceived tenure security. We employ social capital t...

Real estate premium associated with landscape amenities is a well-studied topic with a primary focus on housing prices. Presumably, the willingness-to-pay for landscape amenities should be very different between homeowners and tenants. Thus far, how landscape amenities affect residential rental prices is not well understood. This paper takes advant...

Under the Belt and Road Initiative, a new city-regionalism has replaced the independent county system in western China to form a new accumulation regime. Drawing on empirical materials related to the annexation of Guanghan to Deyang, this study delves into three research questions: (1) how a new accumulation regime is enabled by a new state spatial...

Public services equalization is closely related to local economic and social development. Hence, it is crucial to explore the changing dynamics of public services equalization and its correlation with regional economic disparities. We first examine the changing spatiotemporal patterns of public services provision and local economic performance at t...

Focusing on the highly ‘successful’ China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), this study taps into a less explored topic of housing development in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) through the conceptual lenses of housing regime and enclave urbanism. Drawing on empirical evidence garnered from interviews, survey, observation, and secondary sources,...

Many locales featuring therapeutic landscapes have seen a rise in health tourism recent years. This study introduces an actor-network perspective to examine the co-evolution of therapeutic landscapes and health tourism, and its inherent dynamism. We argue that therapeutic landscapes and health tourism are emerging out of an integrated actor-network...

In the face of state‐led land grabs, enterprising Chinese peasants have started a revolution in the ambiguous and insecure rural tenure system by developing an extralegal property system known as the small property right (SPR). Using the SPR, peasants are able to capitalize on their property through the sale of houses built on collectively owned la...

The explosive advancements of sensing technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) have given rise to various smart technologies that brought profound changes in various aspects of urban life. Such changes may suggest a paradigm shift in the ways of experiencing and researching urbanism. However, we still know very littl...

20世纪50年代后,随着香港城市化不断推进,新界乡村居民大规模迁徙到市区,乡村人口锐减、经济衰退、物质景观逐渐衰败。90年代后,香港开始通过不同方式推动乡村转型,取得良好成效,可为内地乡村复兴提供有益参考。从近现代香港乡村演化路径切入,以转型发展中的荔枝窝、盐田仔、大澳村以及南丫岛为例,基于"后生产主义"理论视角探讨乡村复兴的不同驱动方式,包括由精英阶层"多方联合"推动,由本地居民自发保护,由政府或村民开展的"零碎型"保护,以及由中产阶级迁入而推动的"乡村绅士化"等4类乡村复兴方式。香港乡村经历了从"生产主义"向"后生产主义"发展的演化路径,乡村职能从农业生产逐渐转变为乡村消费,城市资本对乡村社会经济空间结构进行重构。香港乡村复兴主要由民间力量推动,政府参与度较低。乡村转型亟待综合性保护规划...

(1) Background: Rare disease patients in China usually have to travel a long distance, typically across provinces, for an accurate diagnosis due to the uneven distribution of healthcare resources. This study investigated the impact factors of their trans-provincial diagnosis. (2) Methods: An analysis was made of 1531 cases (1032 adults and 499 chil...

Social inequalities induced by education accessibility are widespread and concern land use policy makers globally. Yet much of existing research heavily emphasizes on uncovering the spatial patterns of housing price in relation to education resources. This paper aims to renew our understanding of this classical topic by bringing the importance of t...

In this commentary, while I acknowledge the value of differentiating varieties of urban entrepreneurialism by focusing on different forms and geographies of innovation in public services, three major pitfalls impeding a renewed understanding of urban entrepreneurialism are identified. First of all, financialization, either as a means or an end, pla...

Background: To investigate the multidimensional difficulties in accessing a definitive diagnosis of adult rare diseases and the associated impact factors in China. Methods: A total of 1010 adult rare disease patients from the 2018 China Rare Disease Survey were used for analysis. The Structural Equation Models examined the interrelationships among...

Due to privatisation, economic restructuring, and liberalisation, housing differentiation commonly occurs in transitional cities worldwide. Cities in marketised socialist China are emblematic of this trend. The implementation of housing marketisation reforms in China intensified nationwide housing differentiation. The extant literature on China’s h...

Since 2008, China has introduced state-led financialization to inject low-interest, stable and long-term loans to facilitate urban redevelopment through national shantytown redevelopment schemes (SRSs). Extending critical state theories to China’s transitional economy, we consider SRSs to be a policy model of the state project (mode of policy-makin...

Healthcare disparity is, to a large extent, ascribable to the uneven distribution of high-quality healthcare resources, which remains insufficiently examined, largely due to data unavailability. To overcome this barrier, we synthesized multiple sources of data, employed integrated methods and made a comprehensive analysis of government administrati...

It is of great significance both in theory and in practice to propose an efficient approach to approximating visual walkability given urban residents' growing leisure needs. Recent advancements in sensing and computing technologies provide new opportunities in this regard. This paper first proposes a conceptual framework for understanding street vi...

Enclave denotes an internally homogeneous territorial unit dominated by distinct social, cultural, and economic features, demarcated by a clear boundary, either visible or invisible, to differentiate insiders from outsiders. Scholars have examined the global spread of enclave urbanism from political economy, technological, and sociopsychological pe...

National land use policies and strategies worldwide have attempted to establish a healthy housing rental market towards urban sustainability. Monitoring fine-scale housing rental prices should provide essential implications for equitable housing policies. However, doing so remains a challenge because aggregated data were traditionally collected at...

With the deepening of housing reform, housing mobility and residential differentiation in urban China are on the rise. Extant studies on residential satisfaction and relocation intention tend to focus on rural to urban relocation, while little is known about their interactions in the context of urban China. This study attempts to fill this void by...

Spatial accessibility to medical resources is an integral component of universal health coverage. However, research evaluating the spatial accessibility of healthcare services at the community level in China remains limited. We assessed the community-level spatial access to beds, doctors, and nurses at general hospitals and identified the shortage...

The booming informal housing market has played an important role in providing inexpensive housing for lower income population in the developing world. In China, an informal housing strategy known as " Small Property Right Housing (SPRH) " is thriving on collective land owned by village collectives, and providing housing for more than a quarter of a...

In East Asia, a top-down discourse of making creative/cultural cities, accompanied by widespread local state-led campaigns and their contestations, are now in full swing. ‘Creative/culture-oriented’ local governments equipped with various entrepreneurial strategies, as well as the grassroots creative class, have emerged as two distinct forces shapi...

This entry attempts to understand Chinese urbanism by examining the particular ways of being and becoming urban in the latest episode of China's history. Three keywords run through contemporary Chinese urbanism: transition, mobility, and fragmentation. In post‐reform China, there has been a transition from a centrally planned self‐sufficient agrari...

This paper sees gentrification as a localised response to socio-economic changes with its own spatial-temporal rhythm, rather than an alien practice transplanted from its European and North American heartland. Gentrification in China, as in any other contexts, is an innate process embedded in the dynamic urban metamorphosis, thus requires a provinc...

Promoting social equality in transport has become a key concern in building inclusive cities. Inequities in the burden of commuting have attracted increasing attention from researchers. Although many studies have described the facts of transport inequality, there has been little in-depth research on institutional factors that influence commuting in...

As China accelerates its urbanization progress, the once homogenous peasant worker group has now become more diversified with the rise of a new generation of peasant workers (NGPWs). Whereas previous literature is preoccupied with making intergenerational comparisons or recounting their marginality, how they become marginalized in the first place c...

This research details the mundane practices of policy mobility and entrepreneurial endeavour in Jiyuan in relation to the city’s changing administrative position, and is one of the first attempts at understanding how entrepreneurial policies are mobilized, mutated and diffused in a small inland Chinese city. We interpret Jiyuan’s evolving developme...

The heterogeneous socio-demographic composition of, and social interaction in, poverty-stricken urban neighbourhoods in China is comparatively less understood. Drawing upon a large-scale household survey of dilapidated old city neighbourhoods, declining workers’ villages, inner-urban villages and peri-urban villages, this paper identifies contrasts...

As the idea of creative city becoming a universal panacea for economic stagnancy and urban boosterism, the heavy dependency on creative fixes has widely spread to cities around the globe through urban networks and neoliberal urban policies. Since the late 1990s, Shanghai has expeditiously embraced the idea of making creative city and enthusiastical...