DEPARTMENTAL RESEARCH OUTPUT PRIZE 2024

ADLER Patrick J

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5 Year Impact Factor:

Ranking within the subject:

UK

5 (IF2019-2023)

13/172 (Top 7 %)

ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD

Adler, P. (2024). Brand on the run: place brands as judgement devices and sources of local advantage in the music industry. Regional Studies, 58(10), 1904–1920. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2024.2306326

Products fromcertain areas are assumed to share qualities by virtue of where they aremade. This article considers the economic significance of such place brands in the wider market for symbolic goods. It forwards a theory of these as judgement devices, whereby place reputation serves to lower search costs in symbolic goods markets with excess supply. This theory is investigated through a study of an online music platform where a weak form of place branding is available to producers. Results suggest that branding is associated with musical success at the individual level and that place brands may act as strategic resources for producers from creative clusters. Branding effects do not necessarily depend on the content of the place brand signal (i.e., country acts branded from Nashville are not especially privileged) and may be based in simpler heuristic mechanisms where a listed origin is a stamp of quality or an aid in recognition.

ATTEWELL Wesley L

Publisher:

Place of Publisher:

5 Year Impact Factor:

Ranking within the subject:

UK

8.3 (IF2019-2023)

6/172 (Top 3%)

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD

Attewell, Wesley. (2024). "Empire Redux: Towards a New Political Geography of Race War." Progress in Human Geography. 48.6: 826-842.

This essay revisits geographical debates on empire to clarify how broader geopolitical economies of power and violence have always been experienced at the scale of the everyday as an intimate politics of relation- and difference-making. It is guided by two questions that promise to stretch geographical writing on empire in new ways. They are: how has empire always been a racial project? And how has imperial race-making historically gone hand-in-hand with imperial place-making? Both questions force us to reckon with empire as a multi-scalar project that entangles the foreign and the domestic, the intimate and the global, and so on.

CHEN Yan Wendy

Publisher:

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5 Year Impact Factor:

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Germany

11.4 (IF2019-2023)

1/89 (Top 1%)

SPRINGER

Wang, C., Jin, J., Davies, C., & Chen*, W. Y. (2024) Urban forests as nature-based solutions: a comprehensive overview of the National Forest City action in China. Current Forestry Reports, 10, 119-132.

In tandem with China’s rapid urbanisation and economic growth, some negative impacts on the ecoenvironment and human wellbeing have arisen, such as the urban heat island effect, air pollution and lack of recreational spaces. To address the degradation of urban eco-environment and improve residents’ quality of life simultaneously, China’s central government launched the National Forest City action in 2004, which essentially promotes urban forests as nature-based solutions (UF-NBS) and contributes to achieving sustainable development goals. Whilst this key national action has been implemented for about two decades, it has received limited scholarly attention within and beyond China. This paper is the very first to summarise comprehensively the development of the action, focusing on its rationale, evaluation and management.

CHEN Yan Wendy

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5 Year Impact Factor:

Ranking within the subject:

Netherlands

8.6 (IF2019-2023)

31/358 (Top 8%)

ELSEVIER

Han, W., & Chen*, W. Y. (2024) Survival of biomass and waste power generation: A global overview. Science of the Total Environment 940: 173593.

Biomass and waste power generation holds the promise to secure electricity supply for a growing population and mitigate global warming simultaneously. Along with the increasing commission and installation of biomass/ waste power units (BWPUs) across the globe, some BWPUs failures have been observed, including the cancellation of planned/commissioned BWPUs and the termination of those in operation before reaching their natural retirement. While empirical evidence suggests that factors like feedstock accessibility and policy instruments might affect the feasibility and performance of BWPUs, there is a lack of comprehensive investigation about why some BWPUs failed at the global scale. To fill this knowledge gap, this study quantifies the hazard ratio of BWPUs via a parametric survival analysis using a panel dataset covering a total of 12,829 BWPUs (relying on woody, non-woody, and waste biomass as raw feedstocks) located in 164 countries/regions worldwide for the period of 2001–2021. The analytical results suggest that large unit size is conducive to BWPUs failure, while feedstock accessibility and the implementation of policy instruments (including Feed-in-Tariff and carbon pricing) could largely reduce the hazard ratio of BWPUs, with varying impacts on BWPUs at the planned/commissioned stage or the operation stage, located in developed or developing countries. Our findings not only shed additional light on the fate of BWPUs, which is crucial to enriching our understanding about the development of the bioenergy sector worldwide, but also provide salient empirical evidence for policy-making in terms of ensuring feedstock accessibility, overcoming diseconomies of scale, and making fiscal instruments available and transparent to boost the confidence of investors and entrepreneurs in support of BWPUs development.

CHEN Yan Wendy

Publisher:

Place of Publisher:

5 Year Impact Factor:

Ranking within the subject:

Netherlands

6.4 (IF2019-2023)

2/89 (Top 2%)

ELSEVIER

Jin, J., Chen*, W. Y., Jia, B., & Wang, C. (2024)Cooling effect of urban greenery: A bibliometric analysis. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 99: 128453

The mechanism and effectiveness of urban greenery in mitigating urban heat islands, regulating microclimate, and enhancing thermal comfort has been extensively studied during the last decades. While sporadic empirical evidence has been generated, the trends and patterns of existing scholarship pertinent to urban greenery’s cooling effect have been rarely summarized and synthesized. To bridge this knowledge gap, the present paper systematically reviewed 310 relevant publications in the Web of Science database (1998–2022) and conducted a bibliometric analysis to depict a comprehensive profile of urban greenery’s cooling effect, focusing on global research trends, prevalent research topics, and future prospects. Our analytical results reveal (1) a steady increase in publications, active journals, and knowledge-generating institutions since 2008 that might be attributed to the free accessibility of diverse remote sensing data; (2) a significant increasing trend of transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, expanding from Environmental Science and Ecology to various subjects such as Engineering, Remote Sensing, Construction & Building Technology, Urban Forestry, and Urban Studies; (3) four influential publication outlets including Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, Science of the Total Environment; Building and Environment, and Sustainable Cities and Society; (4) core research themes focusing on the association of urban greenery’s biophysical characteristics with cognate cooling effect, urban heat island mitigation, and land surface temperature; and (5) several new research themes that have not yet well-developed in the extant literature, including the integration of various analytical approaches to up-scale empirical studies from micro-scale to mesoand global scales, extending urban greening-thermal comfort to public health and social thermal justice, and coupling urban greenery’s cooling effect with other environmental/ecological benefits to inform the design of urban greenery for biodiverse, climate-resilient and sustainable cities. Findings of this synthetic review offer a reference for the research focusing on urban greenery’s cooling effect, and provide clear direction for further development of cognate scholarship that is urgently needed facing more frequent urban climate extremes along with global warming.

HUANG Bo

Publisher:

Place of Publisher:

5 Year Impact Factor:

Ranking within the subject:

Netherlands

4.8 (IF2019-2023)

15/172 (Top 8%)

ELSEVIER

Wenting Zhang, Haochun Guan, Shan Li, Bo Huang, Wuyang Hong, Wenping Liu,

The impact of street-scale built environments on urban park visitations: A case study in Wuhan, Applied Geography, Volume 171, 2024, 103374.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed human life globally. Existing studies have revealed that citizens’ visitations to urban parks varied before and after the COVID-19 outbreak. However, few studies have examined how street-scale built environments (SBEs) on routes affect visitations to urban parks at varying COVID-19 risk levels. In this study, a stated-preference survey was conducted to investigate 3,218 visitors’ changes in urban park visitation under various COVID-19 risk levels. In addition to park visit influencing factors, including park features, neighborhood built environment, socio-demographic attributes, and travel distances, multiple SBE indexes on visitors’ routes to parks were obtained from 34,780 Baidu Map street view images using a deep neural network (DeepLabv3+) method. The results suggest that a high GVI and high traffic congestion on the route from the visitor’s home to the urban park led to an increased probability of visiting the urban park by 188.1% (p = 0.044, OR = 2.881) and a decreased probability by 32.3% (p = 0.049, OR = 0.677), respectively. The high probability of visitation was also associated with socio-demographic attributes (including male gender, high income, high and medium education levels, and the elderly) and short travel distances.

HUANG Bo

Publisher:

Place of Publisher:

5 Year Impact Factor:

Ranking within the subject:

Netherlands

8.6 (IF2019-2023)

31/358 (Top 8%)

ELSEVIER

Chao Wu, Shuo Yang, Donglai Jiao, Yixiang Chen, Jing Yang, Bo Huang,

Estimation of daily XCO2 at 1 km resolution in China using a spatiotemporal ResNet model, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 954, 2024,176171.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) serves as a crucial greenhouse gas that traps heat and regulates the Earth’s temperature. High spatiotemporal resolution CO2 estimation can provide valuable information to understand the characteristics of fine-scale climate change trends and to formulate more effective emission reduction strategies. This study presents a spatiotemporal ResNet model (ST-ResNet) specifically developed to estimate the highest resolution (1 km × 1 km) daily column-averaged dry-air mole fraction of CO2 (XCO2) in China from 2015 to 2020. The ST-ResNet model excels in estimating XCO2 by comprehensively considering the complex relationships between XCO2 and its various influencing factors, while efficiently capturing both temporal and spatial correlations, thereby demonstrating remarkable generalization capability. The results show that the ST-ResNet generates a highly accurate XCO2 dataset, outperforming the traditional ResNet. Ground-based validation results further confirm the high accuracy and spatiotemporal resolution of our estimated data product. Using this dataset, the spatial and temporal characteristics of XCO2 across the entire China and several urban agglomerations have been analyzed. The high spatiotemporal resolution estimated XCO2 dataset for China is made publicly

HUANG Bo

Publisher:

Place of Publisher:

5 Year Impact Factor:

Ranking within the subject:

Netherlands

6.8 (IF2019-2023)

5/77 (Top 6%)

ELSEVIER

Zheyan Chen, Bo Huang,

Achieving urban vibrancy through effective city planning: A spatial and temporal perspective, Cities, Volume 152, 2024, 105230.

Achieving urban vibrancy is a critical goal for urban planning and policy-making, and the city's physical plan plays an important role in shaping and supporting urban vibrancy. However, the effectiveness of urban planning strategies in optimizing resource allocation and fostering a vibrant city remains unclear. This study aims to contribute to this understanding by exploring the spatial and temporal effects underlying the association between urban vibrancy and urban forms. Using mobile-phone location-request data along with urban nighttime light data as a proxy for urban vibrancy in Shenzhen, China, we conducted a geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) analysis to examine the relationship between land use, street configuration, and urban vibrancy. The results showed that a diverse land use mix and the proportions of land allotted for sports and cultural usage, parks, and greenspace generally have a positive impact on urban vibrancy. We noted the facilitating role of degree centrality and closeness centrality on urban vibrancy, compared to the negative impact of betweenness centrality. Our analysis of local spatial variations in the influence of road networks suggests a potential connectivity threshold for attracting people to specific areas. Finally, we identified a divergence between weekdays and weekends in terms of temporal variations.