The Geography of Mobility, Wellbeing and Development in China

Big data is increasingly regarded as a new approach for understanding urban informatics and complex systems. Today, there is unprecedented data availability, with detailed remote-sensed data on the built environment and rich mineable web-based sources in the form of social media, web mapping, information services and other sources of unstructured "big data".

This book brings together a group of international contributors to consider the geographical implications of mobility, wellbeing and development within and across Chinese cities through location-based big data perspectives. The degree of urban sprawl, productive density and vibrancy can be reflected from location-based social media big data. The challenge is to identify, map and model these relationships to develop cities at different places in the urban hierarchical system that are more sustainable. This edited book aims to tackle these issues through two inter-related geographical scales: inter-city level and intra-city level.

The text is designed for graduate courses in planning, geography, public policy and administration, and for international researchers who are involved in urban and regional economics and economic geography.

Dr. Wenjie Wu is a Professor at the College of Economics, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China, and a research affiliate at the China Institute for Urban Governance, Shanghai Jiaotong University. He formerly worked as a tenured assistant professor (lecturer) and associate professor in UK universities such as the University of Glasgow where he remains as a Co-Investigator of the ESRC Urban Big Data Centre. His research focuses on the economic and geographical implications of urban environment and development, using empirical methods and data to inform public policy. His latest book is the Economics of Planning Policies in China: Infrastructure, Location, and Cities (Routledge, 2017). He has been named the World Social Science Fellow (Big Data in an Urban Context) by the International Social Science Council. He has served on the Global Board of Directors of the International Association for China Planning.

Dr. Yiming Wang is a Senior Lecturer in Cities and Public Policy and Director of the MSc Public Policy Programme within the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. Yiming’s research specialises in the application of geographic information technologies to study government interventions in the urban transport infrastructure and real estate markets. He also has a longstanding interest in studying China’s urban economic development policies, mainly from empirical and comparative perspectives. Yiming’s peer-refereed publications can be found in major urban planning and public policy journals.