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Urban Governance, Environmental Pressure, and Resident Well-Being: Spatial Patterns and Structured Associations Across Chinese Prefecture-Level Cities

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Urban well-being in China emerges from spatially uneven configurations of development intensity, environmental pressure, governance input, public-service capacity, land-use transformation, and urban–rural conditions. Using a balanced panel of 294 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2004 to 2023 (5880 city–year observations), this study combines spatial mapping, Local Moran’s I, Getis–Ord Gi*, and two-way fixed-effects (TWFE) models to examine how governance-related conditions and ecological and environmental pressure are associated with resident well-being. Prefecture-level cities are treated as urban–rural territorial governance units encompassing urban cores, peri-urban areas, and surrounding county-level jurisdictions. Spatial diagnostics reveal non-identical clustering of resource and environmental intensity (REI), government regulation and investment (GRI), ecological and environmental pressure (EEP), and resident well-being (RWB). REI is positively associated with EEP, and this association remains positive after excluding observations containing ordinary statistical completion. EEP is negatively associated with RWB in the full-sample TWFE and one-year-lagged specifications, but the association weakens in the 2014–2023 and restricted samples, indicating temporal and sample boundaries rather than a stable mediating mechanism. GRI shows contrasting cross-city and within-city patterns, consistent with a distinction between governance capacity and pressure-responsive adjustment. Dimension-level results further show that EEP is negatively associated with rural disposable income, whereas medical service capacity is positively associated with rural disposable income. Overall, the study provides a spatially grounded account of heterogeneous governance–environment–welfare relationships across Chinese prefecture-level territories.

Source: Land

DOI: 10.3390/land15081519

Authors: Qianhui Yuan, Fang Wan, Zhan Zhang, Zhenjie Niu

Institutions: Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Wuhan University, State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying Mapping and Remote Sensing, Guangdong Finance & Trade Vocational College

Language: English

Topic: China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance

Subfield: Political Science and International Relations

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,137