Modeling on Urban Land Use Characteristics and Urban System of the Traditional Chinese Era (1930s) Based on the Historical Military Topographic Map
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article proposes a study of the urban land use of the Republic of China during the traditional Chinese era.
This study uses historical military topographic maps (1911-1949?) in order to reconstruct the city walls as a proxy for the urban areas.
The reconstructed data are partially validated using remote sensing images for cities where such walls have been preserved.
Finally, the reconstructed data are analysed in order to study the characteristics of the reconstructed urban land use.
The article is quite easy to read but fails to convince me on several levels (some of them because of open and reproducible science concerns):
- the resolution of the maps is terrible and I can't see anything clearly
- the reconstruction process is never actually described. Are the readers supposed to be able to reproduce this process with so little information?
- the variety of the dates used for the maps is never clearly mentionned or discussed. When were the city walls built? Do all cities have them? How would the authors evaluate the impact of this choice of proxy - the city walls - (compared with urban area built by aggregating close buildings for instance)?
- the data resulting from the reconstruction are never discussed in detail: are they published as open data (possibly with the georeferenced historical maps used to build them)?
- several times (8 times actually), instead of describing the methods used, the authors actually refer to the software (ArcGIS). In my opinion, this is not supposed to be a commercial and I should be able to reproduce the analysis without using this software.
- the methods used for the analysis of the urban land use is quite interesting but it is difficult for me, without any prior knowledge of China and its urban system, to evaluate such results.
- would this analysis work with modern data? with limits would the authors use? To me, a diachronic analysis (comparing at least the TCE system and the current one) would provide more insight on the evolution of the urban land use. Furthermore, it would be more convincing to show the relevance of the study.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Review of the article:
Modeling on urban land use characteristics and urban system of the traditional Chinese era (1930s) based on the historical military topographic map
The article addresses the interesting and important topic of analysing the geographic location and spatial relations of urban network in China using a variety of methods that are useful in settlement analysis (although not complete in the array of urban geographical research methods). Moreover, the article is graphically well planned and attractive. However, presented text is not without a number of significant shortcomings and deficiencies that negatively affect the assessment of the article as a record of the full process of planning, analysis and scientific inference.
The article is lacking in clearly defined objectives of the study, temporal scope (is the historical situation of the TCE period analysed or also the contemporary urban network?) and a precisely specified area of research. As a consequence, as it were, the other components of the article's structure (perhaps also the entire research procedure) are incomplete, not present at all or in residual form.
Reading the article raises a number of questions and concerns. For example, why in the article the Authors used a combination of settlement studies - a group of cities, as well as morphological (land use?) studies - at the scale of individual cities? Perhaps it is better to focus on one type of analysis, and if we want to combine these two levels of the study, it should be well described and justified. Therefore, I wonder about the correctness of the title, which announces land use analyses as well as urban network studies, which is not quite reflected in the text (especially in terms of land use).
There is a lack of critical analysis of the methods used - why did the Authors decide on just such a set of methods in the study and not another? Why didn't the Authors decide, for example, to use centrographic methods (Mean centre, standard deviation, ellipse of standard deviation, nearest neighbour, etc.), which work well for analysing numerous groups of objects with different spatial distribution and comparing changes in the studied populations in different time cuts (e.g., TCE and contemporaneous). Cluster analysis also provides good results in studies of urban networks.
As for me, the Discussion section is simply an extension of the Results section. The Authors did not provide a discussion or comparative analysis of the results obtained with the results of studies by other authors in the same area or in other countries. The Discussion section lacks references to both, the methodological literature on criticism of the research methods used and the literature on settlement studies, urban morphology, urban geography etc., which would have helped construct the Conclusions section properly. The reviewer feels that too much focus was placed on the methods of analysis and not enough attention was paid to answering the fundamental questions - what do we want to study, what is the purpose of the study and what are the conclusions of the gained results.
Conclusions section - this is more of a summary of the collected research results, however, the real conclusions and interpretations of the obtained results the Authors in the article have not presented very much. They are present in residual form.
In conclusion, the article has a very high potential, however, the reviewer requests that the essential deficiencies in the structure of the article be filled in order for it to be published. Detailed comments are provided below.
Lines 20-21
Abstract:
Is: “The distribution of the city sizes in the TCE was characterized by high levels in the north, low levels in the south, high levels in the east, and low levels in the west.”
Should be: The distribution of the city sizes in the TCE was characterized by high levels in the north, low levels in the south, high levels in the east, and low levels in the west of the country.
1. Introduction
Not once in the Introduction section of the article does the word "aim" or "goal" appear. It should be clearly stated what the purpose of the study is. This is a basic element of the structure of a scientific article and the research procedure. For example, it is not fully clarified, in my opinion, whether the Authors study cities only in the historical period (TCE) or also compare it with the contemporary situation?
Lines 67-69 and 2.2. Military topographic map information
“With the excavation of a series of archives in recent years, large-scale military surveying and mapping topographic data conducted by the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China are considered a reliable data source for historical land use and reconstruction” – I think it is worth writing two more sentences about the source material used in the work in the form of military topographic maps - in what period they were created, what area they covered, in what geographic/cartographic projection they were created, etc. The presented examples of cities in Figure 1 show different symbolization of the mapped areas. A brief description of the set of maps used in the work may be particularly relevant to the non-Chinese reader.
Lines 76-78
“In addition, because city wall construction was basically stopped after the Republic of China, the city wall in the topographic map can be considered as the urban scope.” – It should be noted that such delimitation was adopted in the article and the Authors do not study areas located extra muros (outside city walls). It would also be good to justify such and not another choice of adopted city boundaries in the article. City districts outside the city walls if not administratively, then often spatially or functionally may still be a one single urban organism (see the works of J. W. R. Whitehand and Kai Gu and other researchers of Chinese urban morphology and urban form).
Lines 97-99
„Due to the high altitudes in Tibet, the bad natural environment, and the insufficient development of an urban system, from the perspective of measured map data from the 1930s, there was a lack of a clear urban scope.” – There is no such thing as a "bad natural environment" - there may be difficult environmental conditions for the human settlement, but the use of the term "bad" is a bit of an abuse and simplification.
Lines 109-111
“In terms of the selection of the grid network specifications, the reconstruction of the grid network was based on 1° × 1°” - Which in kilometers translates into a square with what side length?
Figure 2
The article shows some inconsistency. Figure 2 presents the 27 provinces that make up the scope of the research area. In contrast, the results of the study are presented in the following figures but excluding number 27. In the light of this, shouldn't it be excluded from Figure 2 as part of the researched area?
Figures
The second issue regarding the figures is the significant qualitative difference between the maps (Figs. 2, 3, 4, 11, 12) and the other figures - the charts (Figs. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16). Can you provide maps in better resolution? In addition, on Figure 15 - letter designations for individual cities are not very legible. The scale (linear scale) of the presented urban areas on the orthophotomap is also missing.
3.Results
Lines 195-196
“This study calculated a total of 1265 cities in or above the country in the middle of the Republic of China (…)” – I do not understand
Lines 197-198
“Among these, there were 25 cities at or above the provincial level, 179 cities at the prefecture level, and 1061 county-level cities.” – Does the administrative rank of the cities under study refer to historical or contemporary data? What is the current number of cities in China and what was that number in the hictorical TCE period studied? Were all contemporary or historical county-level cities and higher administrative status taken into account? Please explain the criteria adopted for selecting the surveyed number of cities.
Figure 3
What do the ranges for cities in the map legend (B) mean?
3.3 Urban system structure
Lines 223-224
„There were a total of 1265 cities above the county level within the study area, and the total land size of all the cities” – What does small and big city mean in China? What are the criteria for dividing the size of urban settlements?
4.4. Uncertainty analysis: a comparison using remote sensing data
Lines 356-357
„The set of remote sensing survey datasets for ancient cities included 12 cities (…) – Why were exactly 12 cities selected? Please provide justification.
Figure 16.
“Scatter map of the extent of the wall reconstructed from historical topographic maps, and the extent of the wall reconstructed from remote sensing imagery” – Stactter map or scatter graph?
5. Conclusion
Lines 377-378
„The largest city was 377
Beijing, with an area of 58.5 km2, and the smallest city was Jinghe in Xinjiang, with an area of 0.02 km².” – Are we talking about the area of the cities within the range of the city walls or within the administrative boundaries? Are we talking about the TCE period or the present day?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
General Comments
Based on historical military topographic map, this paper is devoted to explore characteristics of urban land use and system of cities in China in 1930s. A number of models, measurements, and methods were utilized and integrated to make a systematic analysis. The methodology includes conventional methods based on characteristic scales (e.g., Getis-Ord’s index) and the methods based on scaling (e.g., fractals and rank-size law). To my thinking, the research is interesting. The results and conclusions are revealing.
In short, this article is helpful for us to understand the urban land use and urban system development of China before the establishment of the People's Republic of China from a historical perspective.
However, owing to a series of problems, the paper is not acceptable for publication in present form.
Detailed Comments
(1) A good abstract contains four elements: background, methods, results, and conclusions. The abstract had better been revised according to the following structural arrangement: background and aim, methods, results or findings, conclusions or significance.
(2) The introduction is too long and should be refined and condensed. Generally speaking, Introduction comprise three components, that is, (1) open context (contextualizing background), (2) definition/statement of the problem, and (3) response to the problem.
(3) The structure of the Discussion part of this article is incomplete. The section of Results represents the heart of a paper, and the section of Discussion is the paper’s nerve center. The section of Discussion in a paper is generally involved with 3 or 4 parts: (1) main points, which response to the questions put in introduction; (2) comments on related studies or problems; (3) shortcomings or deficiency in study method or process; (4) conclusions, which can be separated to make the final section.
(4) The conclusions should be made clearer in expressions and meanings. The important conclusions should be given three times in a paper: once in the Abstract, again in the Introduction, and again (in more detail probably) in the Discussion (if it contains a Conclusion paragraph) or Conclusions (if this part is separated as the final section).
(5) In this paper, the results are confused with conclusions. Conclusions are different from results. Generally speaking, results come from or are directly based on data analysis. In contrast, conclusions come from discussion and represent the climax of discussion.
(6) The relation between Zipf scaling exponent and fractal dimension of city size distribution. Equation (3) is a pure theoretical relation. In empirical work, q*D=R^2, where R^2 refers to goodness of fit. See Reference [39], i.e., Chen, Y.; Zhou, Y. The rank-size rule and fractal hierarchies of cities: mathematical models and empirical analyses. Environment and Planning B 2003, 30, 799-818.
(7) The mathematical symbols of partial equations are not in accordance with the norms. The uses of mathematical symbols are in confusion to some extent, including roman type and italic type, superscript and subscript. Generally speaking, functions (for example, d, exp, ln, log, pi, cov, var,…), numbers, parentheses, and so on, should be written in roman type, while variables and some parameters should be expressed in italic type.
(8) The citation of a number of references is inaccurate. There are some mistakes/errors in the list of references. The manuscript should be carefully checked.
(9) The paper is poorly written by an author whose first language is clearly not English. It needs a good proofreading/editing by a native English speaker. In fact, there are too many problems in the grammar, usage, and overall readability of the manuscript. For example, “Considering the stability of the data and material sources, the reconstruction of relevant historical land use has been typically conducted within the scope of modern China”.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
First of all, thank you taking my concerns into account.
The article is much better in my opinion.
Nevertheless, I am still confused about several aspects regarding the military topographic maps, and their georeferencing.
First of all, I tried to access the given urls to have a clearer idea of the source material: http://map.rchss.sinica.edu.tw & https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ach/china/
The first one I cannot use and the second gives a 404 (url not found). I understand that the authors are not responsible for the language in the first url, but there is apparently a mistake in the second (possibily because it is split between lines).
Second, since I could not look at the maps for myself, I tried to access the articles cited in reference to the collections used (32-34):
32. Jiang, W. The urban form of traditional mid-small cities: focus on cadastral maps of Jurong county town in the Republic China. Journal of Chinese Historical Geography 2014, 29, 33-45.
33. Ren, Y.; Deng, F. Analysis of Cartographic Source Based on Map Integration of One in 50 000 in Mainland China. The Chinese Historical Geography 2020, 40, 132-142.
34. Jiang, W. Number of Commercial Towns in Jiangnan:A Sharp Contrast of the Number of Commercial Towns between Changshu and Wujiang. Journal of Chinese Historical Geography 2017, 32, 56-69
Unfortunately, I could not find or read these references.
Did you translate the titles of these articles and the names of the journals?
Finally, given the typical difficulties related to historical maps (I am a GIS researcher working with historical maps), I failed to understand precisely the following paragraph:
"Relevant military topography has information such as latitudes and longitudes, and we utilized the ArcGIS 10.2 platform for spatial georeferencing. The topographic diagram lacks latitude and longitude information and utilizes the mutual splicing relationships between different graphics for location. In addition, the maps were repeatedly fine-tuned and corrected according to mountain peaks, rivers, and other marker points by remote sensing images."
- "Relevant military topography has information such as latitudes and longitudes" => so you use control points with geographic coordinates?
- "we utilized the ArcGIS 10.2 platform" => I don't see the relevance here. Add it in acknowledgments? Or is it a special method in ArcGIS 10.2? What is the name of this special method?
- "utilizes the mutual splicing relationships between different graphics for location" => I don't understand what that means
- "the maps were repeatedly fine-tuned and corrected according to mountain peaks, rivers, and other marker points by remote sensing images." => Do you mean that you add control points?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for considering the reviewer's comments and improving the manuscript. I hope that the article presented for review will be of great interest to readers.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The quality of this paper has been improved after modification. The authors dealt with my review comments to a great degree. To my thinking, the paper is acceptable for publication in Land.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
