The development of the space of places in Mainland China, where is astonishing because of the varieties in its spatial multi-development patterns on the one hand, and the uneven development phenomenona of its city-regions on the other hand. Likewise, the essay firstly analyzes and examines the spatial development mechanisms of city-regions in Southeast Coastal China since the economic reformation after the 1980s. Secondly, the paper continues to review past literature to sort out and analyze the research orientation concerning the problem-solving of uneven spatial development. Thirdly, we attempt to employ Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Geography Information System (GIS) as a research method to explain some spatial change factors in town-governance where is related with the social-economic transfer process before the millennium (1995-1999); i.e., to represent the distinctions between seven major regions (included its inter/intra major city), and four major municipality, above those concerning the issues of their attraction of foreign direct investment, GDP, tertiary industry, etc. Lastly, with in-depth interview field survey (this method differentiates from the quantitative models of other research employed) from Xia-men, which is a special economic district located in the southeast coastal area, whose recent changes will be discussed further as a case study in this paper. Concerning the purpose and contribution of the study, the author attempts to testify that the major (uneven spatial development) mechanisms for the contemporary city-regions in China lies in the “decision-maker/ grassroots/ local state”, which has immeasurable activeness and strenuousness on their energetic and special local management models.

To improve the competitiveness of the ROC, the Executive Yuan amended the “Organic Statute of the Executive Yuan” and submitted the bill to the Legislative Yuan on April 26, 2002 for further reviewing. According to the amendment, the current 32 administrative agencies will be incorporated into 23 eventually; the so-called “Governmental Reengineering” project as such also means that to innovate the whole bureaucratic system is somewhat inevitable. In addition, its outcome; no doubt, is rather significant to the ROC’s future development. This essay focuses on Article 3 of the amendment and analyzes the importance to establish an agency named “the Ministry of Environment and Resources” in the ROC on an all- around basis. First, to articulate the essence of the said Ministry based on both Germany and Japan’s experience of setting up equivalent institutions recently. In Germany’s case, its Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Natural Planning Construction and Urban Development were combined to be the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Housing on July 10, 2001. Japan, on the other hand, incorporated the Ministry of Construction, the National Planning Bureau, and Hokkaido Development Bureau into the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport on January 6, 2001. After reviewing the organizations and functions of both Germany and Japan’s agencies, it reveals that the Ministry regulated by Article 3 is not only defected functionally but also structurally. The essay concludes that an agency named “Ministry of National Planning and Construction” should be established. Moreover, the said Ministry shall be in charge of relevant functions such as resources conservation, national planning, land, housing and engineering research. The above suggestion is considered to meet the span of management that put the Nation to finish early the mission stage and reach the construction goal.

School construction is an important foundation for school operations. Without proper housing facilities, it is impossible for any school to operate properly. Currently, an overall insufficient capacity in terms of personnel, procedures, and basic construction knowledge were found among public school administrators due to the nature of the school administration. A well-rounded management personnel requires basic construction knowledge, understanding of overall school needs, and the related government purchasing laws. Without proper management process, insufficient budget, improper execution of the project, it is usually resulted in poor performance of the building procedure. Worst of all, if this happens, both the administrator and the construction project will be seriously impacted. In order to make corrections to the problems found, in-depth studies to the current operations were carried out. In addition, this study investigated school construction management issues in terms of school need planning, application to the upper level of administrator, architecture design process, related laws, past experiences and to lay down a foundation for a better way of management strategies for public schools. Many possible solutions were studied and suggested. It is imperative to have school building construction management procedure to be organized and past experience well learned and distributed. In conclusion, a Professional Construction Manager (PCM) may be a good system to be employed by the school in assisting the school administrators in making their job more efficient and effective in school building construction projects.

 Nowadays the globalization and the promotion of information and communication technology lead to the reduction of transaction costs. However, the innovative activities of high-tech business still emphasize the localized face-to-face contacts in terms of the uncertainty and implicitness of the new innovative knowledge. Thus the locality remains an important determinant for transnational companies and enables the emerging of cross-border division. On the one hand, it changes the industrial distribution and spatial structure; on the other hand, it leads to the demands of strategic function of management and organization innovation. The creation, introduction and operation of these functions all rely on the supporting of service industries with specialization function. Since the Hsin-Chu Science-Based Park (HSIP) has been established over two decades, the evolution of the vicinity of HSIP has created a close networking which includes production, R&D and incubation. Besides the proximity, producer services play a crucial interface between supporting space and technological infrastructure. This study focus on the interaction, spatial evolution and distribution between firms in park and producer services firms around the vicinity, and the coordination with research institutes. We found that producer services are strongly influenced by these situations that are the emerging industrial environment and the networking linkage among different industrial resources.

The paper investigates the influences of increasing returns on the spatial distribution of urban settlement systems and attempts to interpret why urban settlement systems exhibit the power law distribution. The so called “power law” is referred to as the relationship between the scale and frequency of objects. That is, the number of objects whose sizes exceed S is proportional to S(superscript -a) , and then the system forms an organization automatically. The former research indicated that, based on the computer simulations designed on increasing returns, under the hypothesis of an uniform plane, the urban settlement systems highly conformed to the power law (Yu and Lai, 2001). Based on the ground, the paper relaxes the hypothetic restrictions of the model, so that it will not be constrained by the uniform plane and adds the consideration of migration behavior, for the purpose of making a more common, realistic conclusion. The outcome of the simulations shows that, after the restrictions are relaxed, the settlement systems still closely conform to the power law; it does not change for adding migration behavior and non-uniform plane. Conclusive claims must be backed by deductive evidence. The result also shows that, after migration behavior is taken into consideration, it often accelerates the tendency of big cities growing up. While the outcome of the non-uniform plane indicates that geographical advantage is merely one of the factors that influences the location of a city, the occurrence of small events with the effect of increasing returns often make some locations become big settlements, so we can not totally use geographical advantage to interpret where the city will be formed. This finding is consistent with Arthur’s insight into the location choice theory of firms. On the other side, the result of simulation model show that after the mechanism of incresing returns is lifted, the formulated settlement system is far away from the real world. Therefore we argue that increasing returns would be one of the underlying mechanisms through which the power law relationship of urban settlement systems emerges.