Beijing’s fast urban growth has caused serious traffic congestion and great environmental damage. The government plans to develop sub-centres in its metropolitan area to ease the pressures associated with being a sole, centralized city service provider. This has been formalized in its recently published master plan, the ‘Beijing City Master Plan (BCMP), 2004-2020’ (BCMP), which targets the formation of the city plan up to 2020. This study develops a general land-use and transport interaction model to forecast the housing rent distribution based on the present land-use policies and examines whether the objective of decentralized multi-centres can be achieved based on a ‘business as usual’ scenario. Modelling results show that as of 2020 there will be no sub-centres formed around urban Beijing. Some zones demonstrate the potential to become sub-centres with higher rent increases than the surrounding zones. However, the distribution of these potential zones has a different spatial pattern from what the master plan anticipates. This work may well provide a modelling tool for China’s decision makers to examine land-use policies before putting them into practice.

Japan is at great risk of being struck by huge earthquakes. When a strong earthquake occurs, various other disasters such as fire, collapsing buildings, and road blockages simultaneously occur as a result. In such a situation, it is difficult to ensure that the local emergency activities by, for example, the public fire company and community volunteers, are sufficient. Considering this issue, mutual assistance among residents, such as firefighting, evacuating victims, and helping those in need of assistance to designated safety sites, is extremely important. This paper proposes the development of an evacuation activities simulator, considering the capability of mutual assistance under various earthquake disasters to support exploration of community-based activities. In particular, the simulator calculates the time that local resident agents take to evacuate to the designated safety site, and the number of agents that can and cannot evacuate. Users can change the ratio of those who cannot evacuate to the designated safety site based on whether they are without some support or with persons who support them. Therefore, users can compare the simulation results of various outcomes. Through the experimental demonstration the following findings were obtained. Confirming the simulation results, users can understand that human suffering is reduced by mutual assistance activities. In addition, users can distinguish when the capability of mutual assistance is high or low, and when the capability of mutual assistance is changed according to the time of day due to the presence of the commuting population. Therefore, users can explore the countermeasures used to reduce human suffering when the capability of mutual assistance is low.

There have been various technologies developed to solve the inundation problem that occurs in almost all urban areas. Some of these technologies, such as low impact development (LID), are developed through the concept of source control. The first step of LID practice is to know the runoff behavior on a certain surface of an area, following that, the LID practice is then designed. One of the objectives of LID is to decrease inundation depth on the road. This study aims to learn the profile and behavior of storm water flow along roads before they reach an intersection of a road system in Purwantoro region, Malang City, Indonesia. The study design consisted of field measurements and analytical activities as follows: determination of the independent and dependent variables; field measurements and data collection; simulation of flow profiles with various return periods of rainfall using Hydraulic Simulation Model HEC-RAS ver. 4.1; and verification of the simulation result of flow profiles using observation data. This research concluded that slopes on the branch road and runoff discharge on the main road significantly influenced flow depth at the road intersection. The relationship was expressed by power equations. In contrast, the runoff velocity at the branch road was more influenced by the discharge on the branch road and the main road, and the relationship followed a linear equation. A further study is required to decrease the runoff discharge on the road using LID technology such as concrete block pavement as a replacement for asphalt pavement.

Principally, the enrolment of elementary school in China is solely based on residential location. Due to the scarcity of prestigious schools, the household registration (or hukou in Chinese) and the territorial-based school admission policy, a feasible approach for parents to provide the children with good education is to purchase the house in the attendance zone of a high-quality school (or xuequfang in Chinese). The supply-demand imbalance gives rise to the xuequfang phenomenon (much higher prices of xuequfang relative to non xuequfang). Based on 1250 housing samples in 286 multi- or high-storey residential districts, this paper firstly develops two basic and four Box-Cox transformed hedonic price models to estimate the effect of high-quality schools on residential property prices. The consistency of six models greatly enhances the credibility of this study. Moreover, complementary, the propensity score matching technique is used to estimate the treatment effect. The two methods consistently suggest that residential property values are affected by top-tier schools. They reveal that xuequfang exhibit values that are between 9.3% and 12.1% higher than non-xuequfang, ceteris paribus. The negative influences of the xuequfang phenomenon and several countermeasures (gradually reforming household registration system, optimizing resource distribution to balance the quality of education, highlighting family education and children’s all-round development) are discussed.

As China is characterized by a large ageing population, and its rapid speed of ageing, urbanization, and socio-economic transformation, the senior service issue is both typical and urgent. To support the urban planning and decision-making of relevant policies for senior services, which is significantly challenging, this research employs the multi-agent simulation (MAS) approach to simulate the complicated process of Chinese senior service provision. The approach defines the elderly, day-care centers, and residential aged care facilities (RACF) as the kernel agents, determines the behavior rules of different agents, and confirms the interaction between agents, individual agents and urban environments. Altogether nine simulation modules were designed and integrated. This study focuses on the diversifying elderly population, complexity of the senior services system, and the uncertainty of the developing background. Seniors’ socio-economic attributes such as income, family structure, education and hukou status, day-care center, and RACF agents’characteristics, such as price, location, service standard, public /private status, were emphasized at a microscopic scale. Using a bottom-up approach, neighborhood differentiation was considered the main determinant of senior service needs. Through the design of different policy-scenarios, critical parameters were determined to have the most important influence on senior service needs and their provision. The regulation of these crucial indicators will be a great scientific support to the planning of provisions for senior service facilities and to the decision-making of environmental improvement policies in different urban neighborhoods. The MAS approach is recognized as a modelling paradigm for capturing the dynamics of complex systems. This research is especially useful for supporting the provision of elderly service facilities and the environmental improvement of livable urban neighborhoods through future urban planning.