Virtual Only | Track 4 | Session 2. Invent the city

China’s continued growth has generated a historically unprecedented reduction in global poverty, and real income growth for the World Economy. Although the fight against climate change and environmental degradation has make some progress, China is still suffering from the tough transition to net-zero, including widening domestic imbalances and upgrading risks of urban-rural industrial clusters. The strength and quality of China’s growth in the coming decades depends on how its cities develop. Strategic low-carbon and sustainable urban infrastructure investments and supportive spatial policies for developing clean, compact and connected cities could unlock a myriad of economic, environmental and social benefits. As a fundamental spatial policy of national territorial development, The Central Government of China has officially responded by proposing a strategy of urban agglomeration since 2018 to further promote regional economic transition and international competition. By the time of 2020, there are 19 officially approved megalopolises in mainland China, which accounts for over 53% percent of the gross GDP of China in 2020. This paper aims to evaluate the integrated development performance of 88 cities from 2016 to 2020, which constitute 8 national urban agglomerations (including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration, Yangtze River Delta Metropolitan Are, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing City Agglomeration, Wuhan Urban Agglomeration, Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan City Cluster, Central Plains City Agglomeration and Harbin-Changchun City Agglomeration). With 10 primary index layers and 24 specific indicators, the process of assessment is conducted within 4 correlative dimensions. The conclusion concentrates on a summary of integrated development feature and a discussion of developmental disadvantages, including a widening development gap between North and South, the decline of the investment-led development model, and an overview of resources and energy consumption among the Agglomerations. What needs to be illustrated is that the high data accessibility and operability of the index provide a clear perspective alternative for researchers and practitioners in other developing countries undergoing society transition. Trends and analytical points of view draw from this paper provide a detailed observation on transition preparation of China’s megalopolises for accelerating towards high-quality growth and carbon neutrality in the coming years.

Impacts of the collective socio-economic activities on the architectural and urban identity of the garbage collectors' community, Cairo, Egypt This article challenges what is generally acknowledged that many Egyptian informal communities' architectural and urban identity is a hazy concept to capture or even define. This research provides a case study of one of the contemporary Egyptian architectural identities through having deep insight of a locally produced urban setting, Garbage Collectors' (The Zabbaleen's) society in Mansheyat Nasser in Cairo. This community's lives reflect patterns of garbage-related business such as collecting, sorting, recycling and reselling, impacting the built environment. This informal settlement forms a real challenge to architects and urbanists to understand the collective identities of garbage-collector groups and trace the links between their identities – manifested by their life practices – and the produced architectural and urban environments. The discussion correlates the socio-economic impacts of their everyday practices on the built environment. The efforts done indicate that this community has collective characteristics that need to be unraveled and understood as part of modern Cairo. Keywords: socio-economic, identity, collectivity, El-Zabbaleen, architecture, built environment, informal settlements

Study urban shrinkage is important to the understanding of the essence of cities, industries, and people. It is a counterpart research area relates to booming and growth. The concept of Shrinkage is addressed by scholars from a wide range of disciplines aims at helping shrinking cities to achieve better urban efficiency, quality of life and the goal of sustainable development. To clarify the research paths and current status of progress in this field, this paper provides a knowledge mapping of urban shrinkage studies based on published journal papers form database of CNKI and Web of Science (WOS). A research approach based on using free software Citespace is proposed. The visual representation of the progress paths, current status and future trends makes easy understanding of this research field. Based on a total of 554 published papers science 2007, knowledge mapping based on keyword frequency summarizing, timeline and mutation analysis, and research hotspot tracing, and research trend concluding is performed. The results indicate that the research trend is to actively embrace urban shrinkage and strive for urban regeneration and sustainable urban development. Strategies such as "smart shrinkage", "compact cities" and "resilient cities" have been proposed to provide new theoretical directions for shrinking cities. The development of models for better understanding spatial distribution patterns of shrinking cities is urgently needed.

While growth in telecommuting was inevitable due to increasing trends in remote work and online commerce, the pandemic gave the opportunity to test its effectiveness for many new employment sectors due to its forceful imposition. Subsequently, positive experiences with telecommuting during the pandemic have resulted in many companies adopting partial or full telecommuting as a preferred work option in many countries. This decision has to be critically evaluated considering, the different employment sectors, employee socio-economic characteristics and their overall productivity. This study investigates the transformation in telecommuters' productivity from pre-pandemic to the new normal situation and the period in-between across different socio-economic strata and sectors and also identifies the factors influencing productivity in the context of an emerging economy like India. Earlier studies on telecommuting productivity are limited to testing its association with factors and these factors investigated are also sometimes adopted from different geographies which may not be appropriate considering the nature of telecommuting, potential benefits, and implementation problems. Factors also differ with time, ethnic-cultural and social-economic heterogeneity across geographic areas. This study attempts to identify factors either facilitating or hindering telecommuters' productivity directly from the primary survey data and attempts to explore its variation with employees’ socio-economic characteristics. Predictive models are developed to recognize the future potential telecommuters along with identification of appropriate policy interventions for employers, organizations and city administration towards the creation of a healthy economy for all. The two-phase online survey (i. during national lockdown and ii. during new normal situation) has been conducted using Google forms (https://forms.gle/4EvAKLsXDbfuHggd9; https://forms.gle/H5WaywBPhVmy3pPT6) via social media platforms for approximately 2 and 3 weeks respectively. Factors influencing telecommuters' productivity are determined from open-ended questionnaires during an initial pilot survey. Out of 13500 individuals reached, 431 responses are accepted after data cleaning. At first, an exploratory analysis has been performed to understand the variation in telecommuters’ perceived productivity across various socio-economic strata and various sectors and scale of organizations during pre and post pandemic. Next, three logistic regression models are developed for the three phases (i. pre-pandemic, ii. during national lockdown, and iii. new normal situation) to test the association of adoption behaviour, telecommuting behaviour, individual, household and organizational characteristics, organization attitude, employees activity –travel pattern, infrastructure, attitudinal and other factors with telecommuters' perceived productivity. The analysis reveals that, before COVID-19, 53% and 80% of the telecommuters achieved at least 100% and 75% productivity respectively that has been reduced to 37% and 67% respectively during the national lockdown. These figures have improved to 49% and 78% during new normal situation. During the lockdown, the telecommuters productivity declined across all socio-economic groups of employees, sectors and sizes of organizations. Employers’ encouragement was found to play a large role in employee productivity. Facilitating and hindering factors for telecommuters' productivity are also identified which can be addressed through various organization-level initiatives like digitization, organizing weekly group meetings, training, and counselling sessions etc. The regression results show males with higher income and higher education qualifications are more likely to achieve higher productivity and thus needs to be encouraged by organizations to adopt telecommuting. Telecommuters' productivity increases with the increase in average work duration and frequency of telecommuting. During the lockdown, telecommuters working during the early morning (6:00-10:00), morning (10:00-14:00), and evening (18:00-22:00) achieved lower productivity, which can be considered by employers during fixed work schedule formulation. Mode choice and travel time are also found to influence productivity thus encouraging further research to establish the trade-off between sustainable travel demand management and economic well-being.

As an important growth pole and a new strategic pivot point for Shanghai's future development, the innovation capacity of new towns will be one of the key development concerns. Therefore, it is important to analyze the innovation space evolution characteristics of new towns and clarify their development rules to support the planning and construction of urban innovation space and cultivate the healthy innovation competitiveness of the city. This paper took 7396 high-tech enterprises in Shanghai which was recognized by government in 2020 as the research object, analyzed the layout and evolution process of innovation activities with high-tech enterprises as the main body from both city area and new town area, discussed the characteristic differences between city area and new towns and also between different new towns. At the meanwhile, this study dynamically observed the changes of enterprise location to find the spatial-temporal evolution characteristics of the innovation activities with enterprises in new towns. The results of the study showed that (1) In terms of spatial characteristics, the overall layout of Shanghai's urban innovation activities was core clustering and peripheral polycentric distribution, obvious differences could be seen between the two sides of the Huangpu River, with the Puxi area showing the characteristics of diffusion and spreading from the core district, and the Pudong area being clustering. New towns were the centers of high-tech enterprise distribution in the peripheral area of Shanghai. Observing the distribution of different types of high-tech enterprises, unlike the circle-type layout of manufacturing and service industries, innovative industries were obviously clustered and distributed, while there was no obvious industry type zoning within the new towns, but a mixture of multiple types of distribution. (2) In terms of the spatial evolution, the spatial pattern of innovation in city area reflected the characteristics of "agglomeration - diffusion - contiguity", and the scope of innovation activities is constantly expanding. The spatial changes within the new towns could be characterized as three models: a tendency of concentration or strengthening in a certain direction; overall changes; and changes in the main direction of agglomeration, reflecting that the innovation space in the new towns adjusted accordingly to the changes of some elements in the process of development like public transportation. (3) The cultivation process of innovation subjects was significantly related to the innovation policies promulgated by the government, reflecting the higher dependence of high-tech enterprises on policies. (4) After a comparative study on the locational changes of high-tech enterprises, it was concluded that there was a high demand for locational reconfiguration, which spatially reflected a further strengthening of central agglomeration. More than half of the enterprises in new towns changed their location, and 74% of them moved from new towns, they chose to move closer to the central city, reflecting that it was still more difficult to retain local innovation activities in new towns. Based on the study results, it can be seen that in the future, it will be harder to attract innovative enterprises to a single industrial park or with policy bonuses alone. It is necessary to combine public service facilities, transportation network, the improvement of government service level and living environment. How to create the innovation space that meets both higher environmental quality and lower cost will be the focus on the healthy development of innovation economy in the future.

The rapid urbanization process in China has accelerated the loss of urban characteristics and the uniformity of urban landscape. Spatial narrative theory, as a non-material design that focuses on the human mind in space, can be a good solution to this problem, so the research in this field has received much attention from scholars in the planning field in recent years and has set off a new wave of theoretical and practical exploration in China. This paper summarizes the research distribution and research hotspots in this field by collecting and organizing the relevant literature on spatial narratives in Chinese urban space research in the past 20 years, conducting literature visualization analysis with the help of Citespace software, and summarizing the research distribution and research hotspots in this field through keyword co-occurrence, keyword burst and citation volume analysis, and dividing its research trends into stages. Then we systematically sort out the theoretical research, application space and research methods, and summarize that the research progress in this field as a whole presents in-depth, diversified and interdisciplinary, and finally put forward the outlook from three aspects: enriching research levels, expanding research subjects and innovating research methods. This paper holds that in the context of global sustainable development and the consensus of using cultural heritage to leverage sustainable urban development, the study of spatial narrative theory in the field of urban space will remain a continuous hot spot, and this paper will provide a basis and reference for scholars' research, and its research progress will have considerable reference significance for other countries.

To study the spatial relationship between green environmental exposure level and house price in different community living circles. Taking the humanistic perspective as the starting point, through the methods of machine learning and spatial autocorrelation, this paper selects Changbai island in Shenyang as the research unit to study the spatial distribution relationship between green environment exposure level and house price in different community life circles. There is spatial autocorrelation between the exposure level of green environment and house price in different community life circles, and the perception level of green environment in different life circles is significantly different. 5. 10. The green environmental exposure within the 15 min living circle basically coincides with the spatial distribution of the bivariate cold and hot spots of house prices,and the cold and hot spots of "high high" and "low low" are obviously concentrated. Affected by the urban functional structure and the quality of street green environment, the green environment exposure level of the community presents a spatial distribution relationship of first dispersion and then agglomeration.

Indian developing middle cities (Tier-II and Tier-III cities) are competing in the same race of development once the megacities led and are swelling with similar problems. Human resource and land are the city's biggest assets. Real estate-driven development often utilizes human resource to achieve its aspiration and dream while forgetting them and the cities culture. Urban areas in India are increasingly becoming divided and segregated (social marginalization) leading to a denial of the right to the city (exclusion from resources, services, access to space etc.) based on social class. Large industrial land parcels dedicated to livelihood provision to labour class within the cities are undergoing real estate-driven development to profit from private drivers catering to specific classes. Along with development and migration, the city is reorganized based on socio-economic status leading to exclusion, especially of labour (semi-skilled, un-skilled). The transformative and replacement method of development in these cities views labours as sojourns. Deemed as a transient population, they have insecure conditions of work alongside housing and utilities. These stakeholders who are long-contributors to the city's aspiration are left behind without adequate space. The thesis aims to trigger an inclusive interdependent model while enhancing economic opportunities and equal right, socially dynamic environments for marginalized stakeholders. The above-discussed phenomenon in developing cities that attract labours while segregating them within zones is a visible scenario in Hubli. As the gateway to the Deccan region along the industrial corridor, Hubli was culturally inclusive towards anyone who arrived at the city through social institutes such as Mathas. While it has been developing rapidly and attracting labour migrants, the city lacks space for such labour who end up in slums. This creates pressure on slums to accommodate more and more people while the city does not provide them with any support. Old industries which once provided economic opportunities to many are now rapidly commercializing to satisfy real estate needs with no regard to its urban commons or the marginalized. Due to such exclusive developmental processes, stakeholders are segregated within zones to achieve short-term economic gains while also hindering their interdependencies. Urban Design could become a medium/ middle ground to triggering inclusive developments beneficial for both the marginalized and the city. This thesis would benefit from context while taking advantages of the socio-economical and socio-ecological asset as a new continuous urban seam that connects different interfaces (urban commons, built and open network) for socially inclusive development.

The epoch of great digital radicalization and transformation along with the breakthroughs in communication and information technology supplemented by artificial intelligence has approached already. With the rapid transformation in this technologically advanced era, we have entered an age of a revolution in finance with the emergence of the blockchain economy that has resulted in the creation of digital tokens. The non-fungible token (NFTs) is one such product of this technology, with its own digital marketplaces. Even though the NFTs have benefitted the circle of artists, the question is whether is it extending any advantage to the global community? The point of contention here is also how the NFTs have, despite their glorious appeal to budding artists, have had environmental implications. This paper adopts a digital ethnographic approach, exploring the commonalities in the lives of young people who engage in the NFT trading online, either as a seller, a buyer, or a collector. It further underpins the drawbacks of NFTs and the blockchain economy on the environment. In addition to that, the paper also looks into how the NFTs perpetuate the economy of appearances.