The key to studying urban sustainable development depends on quantifying stores, efficiencies of urban metabolisms and capturing urban metabolisms′ mechanisms. This paper builds up the metabolic emergy account and quantifies some important concepts of emergy stores. Emphasis is placed on the urban metabolic model based on the slack based model(SBM) method to measure urban metabolic efficiencies. Urban metabolic mechanisms are discussed by using the regression method. By integrating these models, this paper analyzes the urban metabolic development in Beijing from 2001 to 2010. We conclude that the metabolic emergy stores of Beijing increased significantly from 2001 to 2010, with the emergy imported accounting for most of the increase. The metabolic efficiencies in Beijing have improved since the 2008 Olympic Games. The population, economic growth, industrial structures, and environmental governance positively affect the overall urban metabolism, while the land expansion, urbanization and environmentally technical levels hinder the improving of urban metabolic efficiencies. The SBM metabolic method and the regression model based on the emergy analysis provide insights into the urban metabolic efficiencies and the mechanism. They can promote to integrate such concepts into their sustainability analyses and policy decisions.
SONG TaoCAI JianmingXU HuiDENG YuNIU FangquYANG ZhenshanDU Shanshan
Tourists’ authentic perceptions are crucial for the development of world heritage resources. The paper focuses on exploring the relationships between tourists’ authentic perceptions and authenticity-based tourism development of world heritage. Through the empirical study on the Forbidden City in Beijing, we find that the relationships between the above two factors can be simulated by the model of set theory in algebra. As a result, five types of set relationships are proposed： “separation relation”, “intersection relation”, “inclusion relation I”,“inclusion relation II” and “superposition relation”. According to sample distribution rules, the set relationships can be further divided into primary set relationships and secondary set relationships. The study on set relationships based on demographic characteristic of tourists by using two-way analysis of variance method shows that the tourists in different groups of gender, ages, levels of education, visit frequencies and levels of early perspectives have different perceptions for the set relationships. The ifndings in this paper are helpful for identifying effects of the authenticity-based exploitation of world heritage resources and proposing future strategies for world heritage resources from tourists’ authentic perspectives.
