This academic paper explores the impact of multi-entity cooperation on the effectiveness of public service provision in China. It examines the social governance pattern proposed by the 19th National Congress of the CCP and the emphasis on co-building, co-governing, and sharing. The paper highlights the need for collaboration among various entities and the transition from sole government provision to improve urban public services. It aims to investigate the moderating effects of institutions, policies, and public participation. The study will involve quantitative and qualitative phases in three cities in Guangdong Province and target governmental departments, commercial organizations, non-profit social organizations, and local residents. The research aims to provide policy recommendations, innovate institutional policies, enhance public engagement, and improve multi-party cooperation and urban public services. It seeks to contribute practical models and measures for effective government public management and service implementation.

Despite the apparent agreement today on the concept of sustainability, the means to achieve it holistically are still controversial. “Just sustainability” concept has recently gained traction, casting doubt on whether sustainability can be attained under capitalism. On the social level, many recent urban studies have been concerned with the concept of social justice and the distribution of resources and wealth as a means to achieving socially equitable sustainability. In this regard, a few questions are brought up: can social sustainability be achieved under capitalism? Are Islamic built environments a viable alternative? Many contemporary studies have described Islamic built environments as sustainable and strived for defining their sustainability criteria. However, they mostly focused on the built environment’s physical environmental aspects without relating them to the socio-economic spheres. Using the concepts of power and rights as key analytical tools, the paper examines a few capitalist utopian reform approaches and compares them in terms of their ability to achieve just sustainability with Islamic built environments. Several examples from primary Islamic history books will be used to examine Islamic built environments. It is concluded that Islamic built environments have attained the just sustainability that contemporary reform approaches sought to accomplish.

More and more urban studies researchers and students are using images. This choice often stems from the need to illustrate, analyse and understand territories and urban phenomena. This contribution seeks to demonstrate, on the basis of examples drawn from scientific productions in Greater Lomé, how the photographic approach makes it possible to apprehend the urban phenomenon. Three forms of image use can be identified in the documents consulted. On the one hand, images are a source of data to support information received through observation. On the other hand, photography is a technique for collecting metadata which, when triangulated with several sources, enables a query to be answered. Finally, the diachronic and chronological analysis of images of a social reality enables us to detect the visible and the invisible in order to take a critical look at the social world and the dynamics of social relationships.

Poverty, and especially the widening disparity between the rich and the poor, leads to social unrest that can interrupt the harmonious development of human society. Understanding the reasons for income inequality, and supporting the development of an effective strategy to reduce this inequality, have been major goals in socioeconomic research around the world. To identify the determinants of the income gap, we calculated the Gini coefficients for Chinese provinces and performed regression analysis and contribution analysis for heterogeneity, using data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2002 to 2018. We found that urbanization, higher education, and foreign direct investment in eastern China and energy in central and western China were important factors that increased the Gini coefficient (i.e., decreased equality). Therefore, paying more attention to the fair distribution of the factors that can increase the Gini coefficient and investing more in the factors that can reduce the Gini coefficient will be the keys to narrowing the income gap. Our approach revealed factors that should be targeted for solutions both in China and in other developing countries that are facing similar difficulties, although the details will vary among countries and contexts.

The detection of urban expansion through digital processing of satellite images provides valuable information for understanding the dynamics of land use change and its spatial relationship with environmental factors. In order to apply or generate effective land-use planning policies, it is essential to have a historical record of the regional distribution of human settlements, an element that is practically non-existent in our country. For this reason, this text aims to determine the urban growth rate during the period 2000–2014 in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, and to identify potential expansion zones from Landsat images. Six Landsat scenes were used for the spatial analysis of the state urban coverage and their relationship with the road influence area was evaluated. Two maps were obtained as cartographic products: one of urban coverage distribution and another of the municipalities with the greatest expansion, whose areas are located in the Valle del Mezquital region. However, Mineral de la Reforma, Tetepango, Tizayuca and Pachuca de Soto stand out for their growth rates during the study period: 183.44%, 102%, 94% and 68.5%, respectively. In total, the state urban area in-creased 72.3 km² from 2000 to 2014 with an average growth rate of 1.8% per year. Such growth was associated with the areas of influence of important road infrastructure, such as the Libramiento Arco Norte in Hidalgo. Therefore, the Mezquital Valley and the Mexico Basin are considered as potential regions for urban expansion in the state.