Research

Why do firms choose particular locations? Our analysis proceeds at two levels. Within metropolitan areas, research on Shanghai shows that amenities do not attract all economic activity alike: they matter only modestly for the average producer-services firm, whereas "local creativity" — activity sustained by knowledge spillovers and face-to-face contact — responds far more strongly to co-location, accessibility and dense amenity clusters (Cities, 2022). Firm suburbanization is equally differentiated: producer services respond more strongly than manufacturing to neighborhood characteristics, and reading suburban job growth as simple decentralization obscures these differences (The Professional Geographer, 2020). At the finer scale of individual sites, a study of Wuhan's automotive industry finds that metropolitan amenity patterns set each district's competitive advantage, while the clustering appeal of a specific location depends on the quantity and diversity of local amenities, with infrastructure and public services the most stable factors (Applied Geography, 2025). The policy implication is clear: central and peripheral districts need different amenity priorities, and industrial policy works best in concert with placemaking.

The number of centers on a map is only one facet of urban structure. "Polycentricity" can mean entirely different things: population, employment, housing prices, amenities and transport networks each identify different centers, and single-indicator judgments are easily misleading (Chinese Geographical Science, 2025). Form and function must also be verified separately. Utah's Wasatch Front is morphologically dispersed, yet trip-chain data show that daily life remains functionally dominated by downtown Salt Lake City — walking and cycling trip chains are common inside centers, while cars dominate elsewhere (Applied Geography, 2021). Housing markets require a different identification strategy: we replace administrative boundaries with attribute similarity, substitutability and spatial connectivity, treating submarkets as connected local markets; the resulting structure measurably improves hedonic models (Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy, 2020).

Equity research starts by separating two things: where resources are located, and where opportunities actually land. Park studies repeatedly find the two misaligned. In Salt Lake City, southern peri-urban residents rated park access more positively than spatial metrics suggest, while western communities' quality deficits deepened during the pandemic — the urban–peri-urban contrast shows why equity assessment must combine facility distribution with lived experience and stated needs (Landscape and Urban Planning, 2025). The Wuhan evaluation adopts a complementary perspective: rather than a single accessibility metric, it asks whether quality-adjusted park supply matches the differentiated needs of the population, with older adults as the most vulnerable group (Sustainability, 2025). Housing markets divide along different lines: Shanghai's sale–rental comparison shows renters respond more to jobs, social services and mobility, while buyers weight ownership value and investment conditions — tenure itself is becoming a new axis of urban inequality (Journal of Urban Affairs, 2025). At the regional scale, Jiangsu warns that falling inequality indices can coexist with persistent spatial polarization and low place mobility, as accumulated advantages in strong cores lock in the core–periphery hierarchy (Applied Geography, 2020).