The journal’s Editorial Office and Editorial Board are jointly issuing a resolution and update of the Academic Editor linked to this article [1]. Following concerns raised about the conflicts of interests between the original Academic Editor and the authors, the Editorial Office has conducted a post-publication review of this article. This review process incorporated the appointment of a new, independent Editorial Board member, Brian M. Deal, who did not have any conflicts of interest. As part of the review, the peer-review process was also re-checked to ensure compliance with MDPI’s editorial process (https://www.mdpi.com/editorial_process (accessed on 1 April 2025)). As a result of this process, the re-review process has confirmed that the peer-review process was conducted appropriately and no significant issues were identified. One additional Editorial Board Member, Brian M. Deal, has been involved in the process of the post-publication review, and the original Academic Editor has been updated and has agreed with the final decision. With this update, the new Academic Editor is satisfied that the editorial process relating to this article has been completed as per MDPI’s Editorial Process policy. The Editorial Office would like to thank the authors for their collaboration during this process.

With rapid high-speed railway (HSR) developments in China, HSR-based transit-oriented development (TOD) has proliferated across the country. Although local governments claim that HSR station areas are planned according to TOD principles, some scholars argue that these station areas actually contribute to unsustainable development. This study investigates two main questions: (1) what success factors should be included in a TOD plan for HSR station areas? (2) to what extent are these factors considered in the plans of Chinese HSR station areas? To answer these questions, we use content analysis to compare spatial plans for 15 HSR station areas across China, triangulating the findings via in-depth interviews and field investigations. This study reveals that most of the factors in the plans for HSR station areas deviate from TOD principles, especially in small- and medium-sized cities. We find that Chinese local governments mainly use TODs as a tool to promote suburban expansion around HSR stations.

The development of high-speed railway (HSR) new towns in China represents a new phase of suburbanization and has had a significant impact on urban expansion, but not all of its mechanisms and drivers have been studied. This article aims to understand the booming development of HSR new towns in China through the theoretical lens of state entrepreneurialism. It dissects the entrepreneurial behaviors of the local state in a medium-sized city, which harnesses the HSR project strategically to develop a new town. Our findings reveal that local governments play out state entrepreneurialism in developing HSR new towns. They compete with other cities for HSR projects. They are motivated by land revenue generation, career advancement for officials, and maintaining state power. Furthermore, this article contributes to the understanding of interactions among multi-level governments. Local states in China can also exert influence on the policymaking and resource allocation of the national government.

There is an increasing need for understanding the impacts of institutions on the integrated planning of transport and land use. High-speed railway (HSR) station areas, as nodes in transport networks and mixed-use areas, have become a focus in planning. The fast development of HSR station areas in China causes many problems, such as remote locations, oversized station areas, transfer difficulties, and unsustainable urban development. Facing these problems, this study aims to explore the influences of actors, decision-making processes, and institutions on the planning and development of HSR station areas in China. An analytical framework is built based on Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), Policy Network Theory, Institutional Analysis and Development Framework, and State Entrepreneurialism. Qualitative methods offer an effective way of investigating Chinese governance in the development of HSR station areas, including content analysis, case studies, and interviews. The findings show that HSR station areas are mainly used as a tool to promote urbanization. Both the Chinese national government and local governments have an important role to play in the planning of HSR station areas because they control different resources. Their interactions in the decision-making process, influenced by institutions, determine the location of HSR stations and the size of station areas, and lead to transfer difficulties and slow development of station areas. This dissertation reveals the causes of the development problems of Chinese HSR station areas, demonstrates the drawbacks of the current mechanism, and proposes strategies to promote the integration of transport and land use in China.

Sustainable urban transformation has become a mantra for Chinese cities. While most studies focus on sustainable urbanization in megacities, the far larger number of medium-sized cities is understudied, although the latter face more severe urban problems. This article develops a framework for examining policy change in sustainable urban development initiated at the central level and reactions, tensions, and implementation issues emerging at the local level. It focuses on an in-depth case study of the challenges in realizing a transition from quantity-oriented pro-growth policies to sustainable quality-oriented ones in a medium-sized Chinese city. We find that there is evidence of changes in long-term values and goals toward sustainability at the levels of both central and local government, but also great inconsistency between goals on paper and policy implementation in practice. Sustainability in urban development is much harder to realize as local officials see urban development as a major means to maintain local economic growth, which can be separated from other issues in ecological preservation. The article concludes with a roadmap for future studies focusing on medium-sized cities, especially indicating how narratives on sustainable urban development hide from view financial and environmental risks generated by the actual implementation of the dominant aggressive urban pro-growth model.

The rapid high-speed railway development in China has faced many institutional challenges for the integrated development of transport and land use in station areas. This paper aims to gain insight into the institutional rules that structure the actors’ interactions and how they influence the integrated development in station areas. The Institutional Analysis and Development framework has been applied to a specific action situation, named Lanzhou West HSR station area in China. The findings from interviews, document analysis, and field visits reveal that Chinese institutional rules obstruct interactions between actors, thereby hampering the integrated development of functions in HSR station areas.

Most High-Speed Railway (HSR) station areas in China can be found at the urban periphery or in suburban areas, a phenomenon that has often been criticised. While debate about the influence these location choices have on the economic and sustainable development of cities rages on, little attention has been paid to the decision-making processes leading to these locations. This paper investigates these processes by comparing HSR stations in three cities: Shenzhen, Lanzhou and Jingmen. Our findings can help actors involved in making location choices develop awareness of different interests and create the conditions for successful development of HSR station areas.

Asset-backed securitization will greatly promote the sustainability of infrastructure construction and financing. However, there are quite limited researches conducted in this field. Given the project characteristics of infrastructure project securities, this paper proposes the issuance steps of redeemable asset-backed notes (ABN) based on the infrastructure project’s usufruct as the basic asset. Taking the expressway franchise as an example, the issuing scale and coupon rate of the redeemable ABN are determined by the expected cash flow of the expressway, the term structure of random interest rates, and the option-adjusted spread (OAS). In addition, this research analyzes the duration, convexity, and OAS.