Jiayin Zhang

2025

1. 

   Adaptation of Chinese traditional villages from the perspective of locality preservation

   Pengcheng Xue, Jiayin Zhang, Fang Wang*, and 1 more author

   Indoor and built Environment, 2025

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   Recently, traditional villages in China have received multiple policy protections and capital injections. While these external interventions protect the cultural heritage of traditional villages and provide opportunities for development, they have gradually eroded their intrinsic adaptive cycle system. This study focused on 6819 traditional villages, revealed the characteristics and transitions of the adaptive cycle stages in traditional villages and described the internal mechanisms of adaptability within these villages. The research findings are as follows: Regarding adaptability characterisation, the adaptability of traditional villages has developed a regionally significant imbalance. The highest proportion of adaptability cycle stages was found in the poverty trap, exploration (r) and gambling traps. Traditional villages are mostly in a rigid state, with a few adaptive processes shifting between the poverty trap and exploration (r), requiring a new impetus to guide positive cycles. In terms of adaptability mechanisms, there was a significant negative relationship between locality, mobility and resilience in traditional villages. Intrinsic adaptive mechanisms gradually disintegrate, and there is an increasing risk of falling into a lock-in trap. This study provides empirical evidence for analysing the issues in traditional villages and offers recommendations for long-term planning and policy formulation of locality protection in traditional villages.

2024

1. 

   Constructing an ideal home: Affective atmosphere creation as a public participation strategy for urban village renovation

   Min Wang(Supervisor), Jiayin Zhang*, Haixiang Zou, and 2 more authors

   Cities, 2024

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   The public participation process in the renovation of urban villages should not only ensure procedural justice but also guide the affective integration of residents. This paper explores the public’s perception of the participation space and the process of affective construction based on a visual study of the Luofeng village renovation in Guangzhou. The aim is to elucidate how the space can be employed to create an affective atmosphere as a strategy for the renovation. The study reveals that participants focused on visual symbols carrying the narrative of daily life, evoking a positive emotional response to these elements. The public participation space successfully establishes a homey atmosphere and achieves the affective reproduction of residents through the creation of its physical environment, residents’ embodied practices within it, and negotiated interactions among different subjects. Drawing on the case study, we advocate for the public participation process in urban village renovation to consider residents’ embodied affective experiences. It provides a practical model that surpasses mere representation, with the intention of offering a reference for sustainable urban renewal.

2. 

   The urban aesthetics of graffiti murals: reproducing wall space in China’s urban renewal

   Jiayin Zhang, Huilin Deng, Mingliang Lin, and 1 more author

   Visual Communication, 2024

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   In China, as in the West in recent decades to a lesser degree, the semantics of ‘graffiti’ have gradually become an alternative term for graffiti murals in urban renewal. Graffiti murals, through various renewal strategies, reproduce the wall spaces of old towns, factories and villages in Chinese urban areas, giving rise to diverse aesthetic attitudes. Taking Guangzhou, China, as a case study, this article utilizes graffiti mural images defined as ‘graffiti’ by people on social media as the basic material. Visual research methods such as photo evaluation and eye-tracking experiments are employed to analyse the aesthetic attitudes and mechanisms of mainstream street art, which in fact differ from traditional graffiti. The study reveals that people perceive different types of graffiti mural spaces in various ways, with a more positive aesthetic attitude towards urban mural landscapes that exhibit aesthetic coherence. Viewers with embodied practice experiences in ‘graffiti’ show stronger aesthetic emotions compared to those who have not visited the case study location. These differences are further influenced by the aesthetic atmosphere of the environment and the aesthetic practices of different subjects onsite, deviating slightly from the spatial aesthetic operational logic of traditional graffiti. From various perspectives on Chinese ‘graffiti’, the visual methodology constructed in this study provides new insights for the aesthetic management of urban renewal.

3. 

   Impacts of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict on Global Air Transportation: from the View of Mass Flight Trajectories

   Chen Chu, Hengcai Zhang*, Jiayin Zhang, and 1 more author

   Journal of Air Transport Management, 2024

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   Air transportation has been severely affected by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The closure of involved Russian and Ukrainian airspace made a great number of flights suffer from a dramatic transportation cost increase. Accurately estimating the conflict’s impact can help us better comprehend the susceptibility of international airlines and optimize flying routes for global airlines. In this study, we quantitatively analyzed the impact the conflict has brought on global air transportation. The detour of airlines and the variation of flights caused by the conflict were assessed from the view of mass flight trajectories. A flight cost increment index is proposed to reveal the extra costs of involved countries. The impacts on each involved country are further analyzed and the airlines influenced the most are identified. The results show that the flight cost of 6.23% of global international flights significantly increased by 13.32% due to the conflict. Furthermore, as one of the few researches that analyze the impact of regional events on global air transportation, the result of the study reveals the vulnerability of international airlines and provides instruction for flying route optimization.

2023

1. 

   Scale transformation of place brands: A visual study of Xinhepu, Guangzhou

   Jiayin Zhang, Mingliang Lin, Min Wang*, and 1 more author

   Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2023

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   Place branding has become a popular strategy to promote place visibility and place image communication and gains attention in the field of city planning, geography, and place management. The contribution of geographical knowledge has been emphasized and discussed in recent place branding studies, including the role of geographical scale in branding strategies and management. However, current research mainly places the issues of scale from the top-down perspective of branding governance, and the bottom-up processes based on local culture and embodied experiences are overlooked. Drawing on participatory-based visual methodology, in the article, a combination of self‐directed photography, photo evaluation, eye-tracking experiment, and interview are employed to the scale transformation performance of place brands from the perspective of embodied experience. Taking Xinhepu in Guangzhou, China as a case study, the results show that both residents and nonresidents do not limit their perception of the Xinhepu brand to a microscale space but point to the city of Guangzhou. Specifically, the process of scale transformation of place brands is characterized by the interaction of temporal and spatial factors that provide possibilities for scale transformation. The physical landscape in space plays a role in place branding, while in time scale, Xinhepu connects Guangzhou’s past and present and is a microcosm of the city’s image and historical development; thus, in people’s embodied perception, Xinhepu can be transformed into a city brand through place culture creation. The article can provide a new explanation for the construction of place branding at multiple geographical scales and explore how the body’s unconscious, nonrepresentational rhythms play a role in place brand scale transformation.

2. 

   How to achieve a balance between functional improvement and heritage conservation? A case study on the renewal of old Beijing city

   Shunyi Wang, Jiayin Zhang, Fang Wang*, and 1 more author

   Sustainable Cities and Society, 2023

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   Historic city centers require function optimization, while simultaneously being pressured to maintain their heritage conservation and utilization. How to reconcile the two is currently a challenge for the regeneration of many old cities. With old Beijing city as the study area, this study innovatively interpreted the value of heritage from the perspective of urban functions, showing the multiple roles and identities of heritage in modern adaptation. In past 40 years, the gradual improvement of urban functions and more even distribution of facilities in old Beijing city comes at the expense of 51.6% of the historic architectural district. Modern urban heritage exists as several types of functions, mainly tourism-attractive heritage as ancient capital’s explicit carrier of history and culture, urban-functional heritage as a stock resource for rational use, combined tourism-attractive and urban functional heritage. Compared with other zones, historic areas have more mixed functional units, predominantly residential mixed with cultural, scientific and educational, and administrative functions. A case study was conducted on nine types of typical heritage sites and their surrounding functional organization patterns, providing references for balancing urban function optimization and heritage conservation and utilization for sustainability.

3. 

   The everyday Chinese framing of Africa: A perspective of tourism-geopolitical encounter

   Ning An(Supervisor), Jiayin Zhang, and Min Wang*

   Geopolitics, 2023

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   This paper conducts a discourse analysis of Chinese tourist writings about Africa on the most popular Chinese online tourist forum, Mafengwo (hornet’s nest). By examining 2,950 travelogues collected online, our research finds that Chinese tourists’ conceptions of Africa are mainly built through 5 frames, including the exotic frame, the adventurous frame, the poverty frame, the China’s engagement frame, and the affection frame that describe Africa as a remote, exotic, adventurous, dangerous, miserable, and backward place compared to a modern China that strongly supports Africa’s development. Much tourist writing corresponds with the official Chinese geopolitical narrative of China-Africa relations that perceives China itself as a peacefully rising power who would also like to help developing others like Africa. However, we also find that some Chinese tourists’ descriptions of Africa fit uneasily into the official Chinese geopolitical conceptions, in which they demonstrate affection for Africa, but only in regard to its Western aspects, e.g., architecture, food, activities. One contribution of this study is providing a bottom-up Chinese citizenry discourses and cultural experiences of Africa, and with this empirical analysis it updates theories of everyday Chinese geopolitics of tourism. We think this study is unique in that we have broadened the understanding of both official and citizenry Chinese geopolitical conceptions and their (dis)connections, in particular from the everyday encounter between geopolitics and tourism, which also sets a frame for comprehending Chinese citizenry geopolitical conceptions of the outside ‘other’.