Modeling Urban Growth and Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Hangzhou, China: 1964–2010

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper “Modeling Urban Growth and Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Hangzhou: 1964-2000” focussing in adopting census data to support urban growth analyses and spatial restructuring studies on populations. The topic is interesting and need investigation. The following reviews are suggested.

• Please avoid not common abbreviations such as line 43: “esp.” instead of especially. Please use the whole word being not an acronym or an expression
• Please include a wider State of the art of researches on the topic (Section 1) focussing on cases of fast-developing cities around the world especially in Asia and other fast-developing economies.
• To what is referring the word scholars at line 140? Please rewrite lines 140-143 increasing clarity or delete them. All along the text there are other “scholars” work, are scholars person working on this paper? If yes, they MUST be added as authors if they have significantly contributed to the paper or were in charge for some specific parts or analyses. In any case the use of this term need to be justified and correct acknowledgement given.
• Quotation in line 167-168 are not adding information, please details their contents or delete them.
• Section 2.3, do you have references supporting the definition of the central area? you assume several correct justifications, but not clear in which way these are translated to define a boundary from the Wulin square (the core of the city in fig. 1 is not a circle), please add an explanation of the calculation approach and eventually add in Fig. 1 a small Fig. 1a showing the area assumed to be the centre, thanks.
• Please explain better in details in which way the not regular shape of district (or minimal census data aggregation) are reported to regular circle dimensions, especially when the circle is touching only a part of the district area, in which way the district population is distributed in the circles?
• Table 2, please add something to show where you pass form one year to the other, thanks
• Section 3.3. need to be expanded adding an explication of differences between circles’ based results and district distribution analyses. You mention mainly to percentage of variations, but probably also absolute ones may be important in some of the district that are near the centre but looks to not change never... At least some small map with population classification for district need to be included in the paper discussing differences with circles.
• Section 3.4 is more correlated to other research outputs to support some data evidences, but these analyses are not driven by paper data. I suggest to summarize in a very shorter paragraph and eventually move to Section 2 where the demo case is discussed, or even to delete and retrieve some sentences supporting discussion. Also the Discussion section is a bit unusual, generally it is based on data results discussing how data analyses fit with paper objectives and supporting specific analyses on outcomes. Probably adding few lines of introduction at the beginning of the section will help a bit in underline the meaning of all parts. Section 4.3 is the more useful.

Author Response

Thank you for your suggestive comments. Please find the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I liked the concept of the paper. But the execution is problematic.

From a technical perspective, there are far too many times when the word choice is inexact or incorrect, the wrong form of a word is used, or a word (usually an article before a noun) is missing.   These problems are particularly acute in the abstract and the Introduction – but there are instances of these construction errors throughout the paper. There are also other problems ranging from misusing “i.e.” (and not explaining what is being presented) to beginning sentences that are not part of a list with parenthetical numbers to not using superscripts for notion where appropriate. Rather than try to document each occurrence, the recommendation would be to work with an editor to ensure that the English language use is correct, and that the paper has a good flow. 

There are two major issues that I had with the content of the paper as well.  The first relates to the presentation of models. The historical models of urban population density decreases are generally well presented in in Section 2.1. But then a different set of models are used to examine the population densities in Hangzhou. While some of the models examined appear to be from the review earlier in the paper, there is no labeling and no explanation as to why the different models examined (e.g., liner, exponential, logarithmic, power, lognormal, power-exponential) are selected for analysis.

The second relates to the concept of information entropy. I know that the topic is discussed earlier in the paper.  But I am still uncertain about how it was introduced to the discussion and how it was used to explain things.  Even with the previous discussion, it still seems to become part of the discussion suddenly and without a full explanation of what it means for the models. Since one of the authors has written extensively on the subject with respect to modeling cities and this topic is still rather under-explored, a more extensive explanation would have been expected and may be very useful to the reader who is not well-versed in this application of the concept of information entropy. 

To that end, I have a difficult time understanding there is a decrease in entropy to an increase in disorder. That seems to me to be counter-intuitive; I would expect uncertainty would be expected to increase unpredictability and thus more disorder into the system – which would represent an increase in entropy. But this may be my misunderstanding the application of the concept in this instance, which further strengthens my argument for additional explanation made above.  

Related to this, the described disorder strongly resembles the “emptying out” seen in Western (especially American) cities as people leave the central core for the suburbs.  This phenomenon appears to have occurred in Hangzhou after the central government granted more local control to cities – perhaps inadvertently creating a system much more like their Western counterparts. This should be explored in more detail.

Author Response

Thank you for your interesting and constructive comments. Please find the attached file.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors have followed and answered to all comments, I only have a minor concern about the large number of self-quotations in the paper that make difficult in understanding which is the novelty of this paper in respect to the previous ones of the authors and that that may limit the international impact of the work. Please limit the number of self-quotation to the very strict necessarily ones and detail the novelty of this work in respect to the previous especiallly on the methodological point of view (and on results). thanks

Author Response

Thank you for you advice. Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is markedly improved. And i feel it is much closer to the point where it is publishable. 

There are still some minor technical issues.  From a technical perspective, the additions and changes have introduced some minor English "errors."  A sampling of them are listed below, along with suggested "corrections."

• Line 5: ... of the five times of national population censuses … (of the five national censuses)
• Line 36: … It is noticed that … (It is noted that)
• Line 38-39: … Since the late 1990s, research 39 on developing countries has also made some progress in this field (…in developing countries…)
• Line 45: … from 2001 to 2015 based on exponential model … (either the exponential model or on exponential modeling)
• Line 151 ... Around the 1970s… (During the 1970s….)
• Line 320 … the power-exponential model has better goodness if fit (goodness of fit)
• Line 393-394: …Therefore, in other words, the actual value … (Redundancy: Therefore or In other words)

More to the point, there were also more theoretical issues with the paper. You took a lot of time to address these in their direct comments to me -- but only a limited amount of those issues appear to have been addressed in the revisions to the paper.

Admittedly, some of the points you raised were to ensure that I understood the theoretical framework of your work in an area where you have a great deal of expertise -- corresponding author Yanguang Chen has published extensively on the subject.  But if you felt it necessary to explain matters to that level of detail to a reviewer, would not some of that explanation also benefit the reader.  In particular, I think the steps on creating the parametric model (Table B, Page 9 of response) would be useful to include.  While much of the other background provided is about the theories on which the research is based, this explanation is more methodological in nature as it is about the research approach used to reach your conclusions. 

 

 

 

Author Response

Many thanks for your constructive comments. Please find the attached file.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

The clarifying table makes the paper. Thank you for adding it.

At this point, I am satisfied with the changes and feel the paper is ready for publication.