ALBERT

Description: Public safety presents high importance in urban sustainable development. Transportation safety is a significant section in public safety. Over the last couple of decades, as a sustainable means of public transportation, urban rail transit presents a rapid development in China. Increasing initiatives and practices have been engaged with views to facilitating people’s travel and intensive utilizing land resources. Echoing this, rail transit stations with multi-floor structure have been built and show structure complexity. Due to this complexity, there is a need to focus on risk management for the stations to guarantee operation safety. Accordingly, this research introduces an innovative approach to identify high-risk nodes in the complex rail transit stations. The high-risk nodes are determined according to two aspects, which are the key nodes of the station and presenting large passenger volumes. Complex network analysis and field investigation were adopted in this study. The Lianglukou rail transit station in Chongqing, China was selected for case study. The research results in this study indicate that (1) in platform floors, stairs/escalators are almost high-risk nodes; (2) columns and metal fences that have been determined as high-risk nodes are located near stairs/escalators; (3) in concourse floor, the determined high-risk nodes present relative high degree centrality and low betweenness centrality compared with nodes in platform floor. The obtained high-risk nodes are helpful for the management firms to develop risk mitigation measures and re-allocate their resources to create a safe environment for passengers in the stations. The guarantee for the rail transit station operation safety plays an important role in enhancing urban sustainability.

Description: Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how advertising is used by real estate companies as an instrument for managing the adverse effects of a catastrophe. Design/methodology/approach Through a theoretical analysis, types of post-disaster advertising messages were identified. On the basis of the likely variations in post-disaster advertising, a content analysis was conducted of a sample of 4,150 property print advertisements to identify advertising messages related to the earthquake. Finally, the message changes in these earthquake-related advertisements were evaluated and compared with the dimension of time to explore the development of advertising strategies. Findings The authors found that 12 types of advertising messages were used by developers in response to the Wenchuan earthquake. The initial advertising strategy was mainly to manage public relations, then the strategy was to reduce or compensate for the increased earthquake risk perceptions of buyers. Practical implications The findings provide valuable references for helping enterprises adopt effective advertising messages and strategies to reduce the negative effects of disasters. Originality/value There are only a few studies on advertising campaigns, especially in the real estate industry, that have been conducted in the wake of catastrophes. This study sought to expand upon the scarce findings in this particular field.