Research on the Identification and Spatiotemporal Evolution of China’s Urban Life Cycle: From the Perspective of Organic Entities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript "Evolution and Spatiotemporal Differentiation of China’s Urban Development Stages from the Perspective of Organic Life Body" (land-4278659). The proposal to interpret cities as “organic living bodies” and, based on this perspective, construct an evaluation system with five dimensions and a progressive identification process based on fuzzy comprehensive evaluation, two-level K-means clustering, and state stability correction is conceptually interesting and has the potential to make a meaningful contribution, particularly because the article seeks to move beyond approaches that reduce urban stages to simple strata of development quality. The main merit of the study lies in its attempt to construct a national, longitudinal, and multiscalar framework for 286 Chinese cities between 2008 and 2023, with an explicit effort to capture the nonlinear nature of urban evolution. However, before recommending the manuscript for publication, the authors must improve several aspects of the present study. Therefore, I am recommending this work for major revisions.

As major observations that must be addressed, I highlight the following:
1 – I noticed some grammatical errors in the writing; therefore, I suggest English revision by a native speaker.
2 – The authors must reformulate the abstract. Note that the current abstract contains 338 words, whereas Land limits abstracts to 200 words. I also emphasize that the abstract should present the main highlights of the results, which I did not observe in the current summary.
3 – The manuscript states that urban development, understood as an “organic living body,” passes through five stages: initial, growth, mature, recession, and transformation. The text oscillates between an organic metaphor, a life-cycle interpretation, a reading of regional dynamics, and a normative public-policy framework. At some points, “transformation” appears as a phase of potentially upward reconstruction; at others, it is presented almost as a liminal stage between growth and decline. Likewise, “recession” and “transformation” sometimes appear as distinct stages of the cycle and at other times as possible derivations of unsuccessful trajectories. The article needs to clarify more clearly whether it is proposing a sequential typology, a system of possible nonlinear states, or a taxonomy of urban conditions.
4 – The text correctly states that stage should not be confused with quality or absolute scale. However, the empirical method ends up doing precisely that by first separating cities according to development level, classifying them as high, medium, and low before the second round of clustering that defines the stages. If the central argument is that stage cannot be reduced to level, then this first partition into three levels may reintroduce the very bias the article claims to overcome. In practical terms, the final identification appears to depend strongly on this first stratification, suggesting that the model remains anchored in relative development level and only later adds a stage-based interpretation. The authors need to discuss this point much more explicitly and demonstrate why this analytical architecture does not reproduce the problem they criticize in the literature.
5 – The model simultaneously includes GDP scale, per capita GDP, total retail sales, local fiscal expenditure, permanent resident population, urbanization rate, built-up area ratio, and population density. Many of these indicators capture interdependent dimensions of size, density, income, and urbanization. Since the article adopts equal weighting, this redundancy may inflate certain structural dimensions at the expense of others, generating typologies that are highly sensitive to urban scale and population size. This problem is especially important because the article claims to avoid the bias that would classify smaller cities as “initial” or “lagging” merely because they have lower absolute scale. The authors need to demonstrate that the system is not excessively internally correlated and that it does not produce classifications dominated by urban size.
6 – The article uses Q1 and Q3 of the indicator distribution for the 286 cities between 2008 and 2023 to establish classification ranges. Although this provides statistical objectivity, the choice is more of a distributive convention than evidence of structural breaks between stages. In practice, the method transforms continuous gradients into three relative ranges based on the distribution of the sample itself, rather than on substantive milestones of urban evolution. This is particularly problematic because the manuscript explicitly criticizes approaches that classify cities by quantiles or linear thresholds. The authors should better explain why, in this case, the use of quartiles does not reintroduce the same problem, and they should also test the sensitivity of the results to other forms of discretization.
7 – The two-level K-means clustering is presented as the core of stage identification, but the choice of K appears largely a priori and insufficiently validated. The article defines K = 3 in the first round for high, medium, and low, and then applies a new round within each group to define subtypes, arriving at nine groups that are then reinterpreted as the five stages of the urban cycle. Metrics for cluster validation are lacking, such as silhouette, elbow, gap statistic, or stability across runs. The manuscript also does not discuss sensitivity to initial seeds, which is especially important in K-means.
8 – The authors state that certain groups “belong to the mature stage,” “belong to the growth stage,” or “show a typical development trend of the transformation stage” based on interpretations of the mean values of scale, structure, and speed. The final classification into initial, growth, mature, decline, and transformation does not emerge fully automatically from the method; it is partially assigned a posteriori. As written, the article gives the impression of objective identification, when in practice there is a substantive labeling step that still depends on qualitative interpretation of the clusters.
9 – Although Table 3 presents means of the primary indicators in the first clustering and Table 4 presents means of scale, structure, and speed in the second level, the chain linking fuzzy scores, clustering levels, and final stage remains insufficiently clear. Missing, for example, are details on the distribution of cases by year, intra-cluster variation, dispersion of cities within each group, and any unstable or ambiguous cases.
10 – Regarding the policy recommendations, although broad and well articulated, they remain closer to normative inferences than to direct implications. Many recommendations are plausible, such as stage-differentiated governance, regional strengthening, and coordination within urban agglomerations. However, the developed method identifies stages, but does not causally test which policies would be more effective in moving cities from one stage to another. Therefore, the article should present its recommendations with greater caution, as implications consistent with the results rather than prescriptions directly validated by the model.
11 – It would be important to report how the manuscript dealt with missing data, changes in administrative boundaries, possible breaks in statistical series, and longitudinal comparability between 2008 and 2023. Since the study depends on a long panel of 286 cities, this issue is methodologically central, yet it is almost absent from the text.

Author Response

Dear Editor,   Thank you sincerely for your insightful and constructive comments on our manuscript. We have carefully revised the paper in full accordance with your suggestions. All revisions have been completed, and the detailed modification content is presented in the attached revised manuscript.   We hope the revised version meets your expectations and welcome any further comments.   Sincerely,   The Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript addresses a topic of academic and practical significance: identifying the stages of urban development in China during the period 2008–2023 from the perspective of an organic life body. Overall, the manuscript ambitiously aims to build a new analytical framework and apply it to a fairly broad dataset of 286 prefecture-level cities. This is a noteworthy strength. However, in its current state, the manuscript is not yet rigorous enough to be accepted for publication. Specifically, my comments are as follows:

Firstly, the manuscript argues that existing studies mainly either stratify the quality of urban development or assess the life cycle of specific urban groups. From this, the authors assert that this study is a new effort in systematically identifying the stages of urban development across the entire Chinese urban system. This argument has some merit, but the current overview only describes previous literature and fails to establish a truly concise “research gap” in the sense of identifying what previous research lacks, in what areas, and how the proposed framework in this paper addresses those limitations.

Secondly, a key point of the paper is that the stage of development is not synonymous with the quality of development, and one should not simply use high or low levels of development to deduce the stage a city is in. This is a very noteworthy theoretical argument. However, when shifting to a system of indicators, most of the variables selected still reflect the scale, level, and capacity of development. This gives the reader the feeling that the paper is still measuring development level rather than life-cycle stage.

Thirdly, the manuscript states that it used the quartile method to divide the indicators into low, medium, and high. Subsequently, the authors constructed a membership function, synthesized the fuzzy evaluation matrix using a weighted average operator, and calculated the composite score for the five principal dimensions. However, the current description is insufficient for readers or other researchers to replicate the process. The manuscript does not clearly present the specific form of the membership function, how to handle the inverse metric, at which step data normalization is performed, how the logic of equal weights is applied at different metric levels, or whether or not sensitivity testing with different weights is conducted.

Fourth, it is a very noticeable error that appears in Table 2. The metric “Local General Public Budget Expenditure” is listed as low <212.12, medium 212.12~132, high >132. This presentation is clearly illogical because the upper limit of the mean range is smaller than the lower limit. This could be a typographical error, but because it is included in the core methodology table, it is a serious error.

Author Response

Dear Editor,   Thank you sincerely for your insightful and constructive comments on our manuscript. We have carefully revised the paper in full accordance with your suggestions. All revisions have been completed, and the detailed modification content is presented in the attached revised manuscript.   We hope the revised version meets your expectations and welcome any further comments.   Sincerely,   The Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors 

I had the privilege of traveling through China and meeting with academics from various universities in that country. My interviews with Chinese scientists aimed to understand the ecology of Chinese cities. In the 21st century, wherever China goes, the world will follow, and if Chinese urbanization does not occur on a sustainable basis, the impacts will be global. Studies like yours, described in the manuscript Evolution and Spatiotemporal Differentiation of China’s Urban Development Stages from the Perspective of Organic Life Body, are therefore of global interest.

In addition to its global scope, I list as merits of your study the remarkable effort of collecting data from 286 Chinese cities over 15 years. You went beyond GDP (an indicator that, for example, is not capable of providing indicators of sustainability), and included data on economic vitality, industrial strength, social services, demographics, and spatial patterns in your analyses. I also consider the methodological approach relevant. You were very competent in drafting urban policy recommendations based on the knowledge you produced. Research like yours should go beyond purely academic interest and include information useful to urban planners and managers. This is an obvious recommendation, given the socio-environmental consequences of urban growth without urban and environmental planning. However, I have reviewed dozens of manuscripts that, while reporting very interesting data collection and analysis, fail to translate the generated knowledge into planning and management. Fortunately, this is not the case here.

The manuscript, however, has many flaws that must be corrected for it to reach the quality expected for an article published in Land. My recommendations follow below, and only after extensive improvement of the manuscript will I be able to recommend its publication to the Editor.

The journal requires a graphical abstract. You did not include it in the manuscript.

The title is excessively long and does not clearly inform readers what the article is about. I recommend that the authors formulate another title, shorter and in the form of a newspaper headline. The title would be more inspiring if it mentioned the most important finding of the research.

According to the journal's guidelines, the abstract should have a maximum of 200 words, for an obvious reason: an abstract should be a short text that objectively informs readers about the content of the article, its main results, and conclusions. Your abstract has more than 300 words and does not clearly inform readers why your article is worth reading.

Add more keywords. They help readers understand the content of the paper. Furthermore, keywords make the article more visible to search engines like Google Scholar.

The paragraphs are excessively long, which makes them difficult to read and, consequently, to understand. The introduction seems excessively long to me. I am not against a section of an article, e.g., its introduction, being a little longer if more text is needed for contextualization for the readers. Is that the case here?

There is no formal division, after the Introduction, into Materials & Methods, Results, and Discussion, which makes reading the manuscript more difficult and less understandable.

Where is Figure 5 (page 17)?

Among other findings, the authors point out that the East is the most developed region of China, with 85.7% of cities in the mature or growth stages. On the other hand, according to the authors, the Northeast is the most critical region, with 73.5% of cities in recession and none in the mature stage. During my trip to China, I was able to observe these differences. In fact, there are several published articles that have quantified these regional inequalities concerning Chinese cities. The fact that these inequalities have been quantified in other studies is not necessarily a demerit, but you should delve deeper, in the Discussion, into a dialogue with the best available scientific literature on such inequalities, to present readers with a new perspective on them.

Finally, I leave here a recommendation that I make to the authors of all the manuscripts I review: make abundant use of any graphic elements – photos, maps, infographics, drawings – to enhance the readers' understanding of the various important information and messages in this manuscript. William Zinsser, in the excellent On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, says that the writer's task is to make life easier for the readers – so images are very welcome in this manuscript. For example, an infographic summarizing the main results of the study would facilitate the understanding of the text.

Best regards,

 

The Reviewer

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English is not my native language, but it seems to me that the English in the manuscript is insufficient for Land's standards. The manuscript presents structural problems and grammatical errors that hinder the clarity of the scientific contribution. For example, "...enhancement of the existing urban stock (two transformations)., the objective identification..." (absence of a space after stock / use of a comma followed by a period,); "...the objective identification of urban development stages and the evolution is a critical prerequisite..." (the correct plural is ARE, not is).

 

Author Response

Dear Editor,   Thank you sincerely for your insightful and constructive comments on our manuscript. We have carefully revised the paper in full accordance with your suggestions. All revisions have been completed, and the detailed modification content is presented in the attached revised manuscript.   We hope the revised version meets your expectations and welcome any further comments.   Sincerely,   The Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Considering the corrections provided by the authors, the manuscript has publication potential. However, it is important for the authors to expand the references, which in my opinion are still insufficient.

Author Response

Dear Editor,

Thank you very much for your insightful and constructive comments on our manuscript entitled “Research on the Identification and Spatiotemporal Evolution of China’s Urban Life Cycle: From the Perspective of Organic Entities”. We greatly appreciate the reviewers’ valuable suggestions, which have helped us to significantly improve the quality and academic rigor of our work.

In the revised manuscript, we have carefully addressed all the comments and made corresponding revisions. One of the major improvements we have made concerns the Literature Review. In response to the reviewers‘ and editor’s expectation for a more comprehensive and uptodate engagement with the existing literature, we have systematically expanded this section by incorporating a substantial number of additional relevant references.

All newly added references are highly relevant to our research topic and come from wellrecognized, highimpact journals in the fields of urban studies, regional science, and sustainability. The purpose of this expansion is to better situate our study within the broader academic discourse, to more critically highlight the research gaps that our paper aims to address, and to provide a stronger theoretical and empirical foundation for our proposed analytical framework and empirical analysis.

It is important to emphasize that no original arguments or conclusions of our manuscript have been altered. The newly added references have been fully integrated into the existing logical flow of the literature review without disrupting the original structure.

We believe that the enriched literature review now more thoroughly reflects the current state of research, strengthens the justification for our study, and better highlights the distinct contribution of our work. We are deeply grateful for your time and continued guidance.

Sincerely,

Corresponding Author: Zhaopeng Li
Email: zhaopengli0201@foxmail.com
Affiliation: School of Marxism, Xi‘an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The revised draft has been improved compared to the previous one and it meets my requirements.

Author Response

Dear Editor,

Thank you very much for your insightful and constructive comments on our manuscript entitled “Research on the Identification and Spatiotemporal Evolution of China’s Urban Life Cycle: From the Perspective of Organic Entities”. We greatly appreciate the reviewers’ valuable suggestions, which have helped us to significantly improve the quality and academic rigor of our work.

In the revised manuscript, we have carefully addressed all the comments and made corresponding revisions. One of the major improvements we have made concerns the Literature Review. In response to the reviewers‘ and editor’s expectation for a more comprehensive and uptodate engagement with the existing literature, we have systematically expanded this section by incorporating a substantial number of additional relevant references.

All newly added references are highly relevant to our research topic and come from wellrecognized, highimpact journals in the fields of urban studies, regional science, and sustainability. The purpose of this expansion is to better situate our study within the broader academic discourse, to more critically highlight the research gaps that our paper aims to address, and to provide a stronger theoretical and empirical foundation for our proposed analytical framework and empirical analysis.

It is important to emphasize that no original arguments or conclusions of our manuscript have been altered. The newly added references have been fully integrated into the existing logical flow of the literature review without disrupting the original structure.

We believe that the enriched literature review now more thoroughly reflects the current state of research, strengthens the justification for our study, and better highlights the distinct contribution of our work. We are deeply grateful for your time and continued guidance.

Sincerely,

Corresponding Author: Zhaopeng Li
Email: zhaopengli0201@foxmail.com
Affiliation: School of Marxism, Xi‘an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors

Given that the manuscript has been substantially improved, I will recommend its publication.

 

Best Wishes,

 

THE REVIEWER

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English is not my native language, but it seems to me that the English in the manuscript is insufficient for Land's standards. The manuscript presents structural problems and grammatical errors that hinder the clarity of the scientific contribution. For example, "...enhancement of the existing urban stock (two transformations)., the objective identification..." (absence of a space after stock / use of a comma followed by a period,); "...the objective identification of urban development stages and the evolution is a critical prerequisite..." (the correct plural is ARE, not is).

 

Author Response

Dear Editor,

Thank you very much for your insightful and constructive comments on our manuscript entitled “Research on the Identification and Spatiotemporal Evolution of China’s Urban Life Cycle: From the Perspective of Organic Entities”. We greatly appreciate the reviewers’ valuable suggestions, which have helped us to significantly improve the quality and academic rigor of our work.

In the revised manuscript, we have carefully addressed all the comments and made corresponding revisions. One of the major improvements we have made concerns the Literature Review. In response to the reviewers‘ and editor’s expectation for a more comprehensive and uptodate engagement with the existing literature, we have systematically expanded this section by incorporating a substantial number of additional relevant references.

All newly added references are highly relevant to our research topic and come from wellrecognized, highimpact journals in the fields of urban studies, regional science, and sustainability. The purpose of this expansion is to better situate our study within the broader academic discourse, to more critically highlight the research gaps that our paper aims to address, and to provide a stronger theoretical and empirical foundation for our proposed analytical framework and empirical analysis.

It is important to emphasize that no original arguments or conclusions of our manuscript have been altered. The newly added references have been fully integrated into the existing logical flow of the literature review without disrupting the original structure.

We believe that the enriched literature review now more thoroughly reflects the current state of research, strengthens the justification for our study, and better highlights the distinct contribution of our work. We are deeply grateful for your time and continued guidance.

Sincerely,

Corresponding Author: Zhaopeng Li
Email: zhaopengli0201@foxmail.com
Affiliation: School of Marxism, Xi‘an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China