Analysis of Landscape Characteristics and Influencing Factors of Residential Areas on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau: A Case Study of Tibet, China.

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is the largest ecological barrier and one of the most vulnerable areas of the ecological environmental system. However, the increasing frequency of human activities in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has led to strong interference. Residential areas are the main places in which human activities are carried out and, as such, can effectively reflect the intensity of activities. Based on this, this research takes the Tibet Autonomous Region as the study area and analyzes the distribution characteristics of Tibetan residential areas using Zipf's law and various landscape indices, as well as discussing the influences of altitude, hydrology, ecological environment, and location on residential area distribution. The obtained results indicate the following: (1) The residential areas in Tibet basically conform to the rank-size principle. The residential areas in central and northwest Tibet are concentrated in size distribution, and the relatively large residential areas are prominent, while the residential areas in the eastern Hengduan mountain region are relatively balanced in size distribution. (2) The landscape index results demonstrate that the counties with an unbalanced distribution of residential areas are mainly concentrated in the northwest of Tibet, while the residential areas in the counties and regions where the administrative stations of each prefecture-level city (or region) are located tend to present a polarization phenomenon, with large patches. The area distribution of residential areas showed a "medium-high-low" pattern from southeast to northwest. The residential areas in eastern Tibet have a high degree of fragmentation and a low degree of aggregation, while the residential areas in northwest Tibet have a low degree of fragmentation and a relatively high degree of aggregation. (3) The residential areas in Tibet are most concentrated in the altitude range of 3000-5000 m above sea level and their water affinity and road-affinity are strong, with the distribution of residential areas within 500 m of roads and water networks accounting for more than one-quarter. The vegetation coverage in the residential areas is low, inconsistent with the surface vegetation coverage rate over the whole of Tibet.

An International Comparative Study on the Resilience of Urban Communities after COVID-19 Pandemic: A One-Year Case Study between Lanzhou, China and Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

After the prevailing of the COVID-19 pandemic, urban communities around the world took initiatives to bring their cities back to life. In this research, 45 indicators and 55 elements were selected to make comparisons between urban communities in Lanzhou, China and Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina from five dimensions of social resilience, economic resilience, institutional resilience, infrastructural resilience, and community capital resilience. At the same time, the ArcGIS platform tool was used for spatial interpolation analysis. In this paper, the inverse distance weighting (IDW) method was used to carry out the spatial analysis of the perceived resilience of the two cities. Due to the heterogeneity of the neighborhood physical environment, operation and management mode, individual attribute characteristics, and internal relations, the resilience of the two urban communities showed disparity in different dimensions. Overall, the communities with good urban property management services, high-income owners, and the convenient transportation have stronger resilience in the face of pandemic. On the contrary, scattered communities, which are scattered in the inner cities, lack effective management, and based on unstable employment, people become the most affected by the epidemic with the lowest resilience power. The importance of social capital, represented by community understanding, identity, and mutual help and cooperation between neighbors, is highlighted in the resilience assessment of the two cities, respectively, in the East and West, indicating that to build more resilient cities, in addition to improving government management and increasing investment in urban infrastructure, building the residents' sense of belonging, identity, and enduring community culture is even more important in the construction of resilient cities.