Exploring complex urban growth and land use efficiency in China’s developed regions: implications for territorial spatial planning

Abstract

Developed regions in China have experienced rapid urban expansion and have consequently induced a series of challenging environmental issues since its economic reform and opening-up. Taking Zhejiang as a case study area, the present paper explores the complex types of urban growth over the last four decades as well as land use efficiency. Moreover, it discusses the implications of the aforementioned on China National territorial spatial planning (TSP). The acquired results have shown that: 1) urban expansion has slowed down, exhibiting a three-stage trend of “slight increase (1980−1990)—dramatic growth (1990−2010)—slow growth (after 2010)”; 2) the complex types of urban growth reveal that the urban diffusion has been gradually controlled and the urban form tends to be more condensed; and 3) the mean values for pure technical efficiency (PTE) and scale efficiency (SE) of urban land use are 0.83 and 0.95 respectively, indicating PTE as the main factor restricting the improvement of urban land use. Based on these results, some beneficial policy implications and suggestions for TSP are provided. First, it is suggested that “Inventory Planning” will be the main direction of TSP other than “Incremental Planning”. Secondly, we should pay more attention to the protection of cultivated land and ecological resources. Lastly, TSP should guide the economic growth away from simply relying on resource inputs and steer it toward technology and capital investment.

Keywords

urban expansion / urban growth types / land use efficiency / Zhejiang / territorial spatial planning

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Data Availability

The data used to support this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Acknowledgement

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.41901360).

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2022 Higher Education Press 2022