Driving mechanism and boundary control of urban sprawl

Abstract

Since the reform and opening-up, China’s economy has achieved remarkable development and so does the urbanization. However, there is an unavoidable contradiction between urban sprawl and the protection of arable land and the environment. By redefining the urban sprawl boundary, this paper is to provide a solution for the conflict above on the China’s urbanization context. The ideal boundary, moderate boundary and limit boundary are defined for urban sprawl in space. Taking Nanjing city as a case, the three urban sprawl boundaries are estimated in this paper based on the calculation of agricultural land resources value in Nanjing. The results show that 1) the integrated value of agricultural (cultivated) land resources in Nanjing is 1.55 × 10⁷ CNY·hm⁻², the economic value accounts for only 8.74% of the integrated value, while 91.26% of the integrated value has not revealed itself due to the existing institutional arrangements, policy distortions, and imperfect land market; 2) it is difficult to define the ideal and moderate boundaries due to the relatively low price of North Nanjing. In South Nanjing the land price is expensive and the ideal, moderate and limit boundaries are expanded to Jiangning, Qixia, and Yuhuatai; 3) the city scale of South Nanjing should be limited within 5.82 × 10⁴ hm², which is roughly the same as the designated size of 5.81 × 10⁴ hm² in the urban planning. It is suggested that the rational scope of urban expansion should be controlled within the moderate boundary.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

urban sprawl / rational expansion / driving forces / boundary control / Nanjing

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Acknowledgements

We thank National Natural Sciences Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 71103182, 41203186, 70833001, 40971074), China Post doctoral Foundation First-class General Projects (2011M500098, 2013T60577), National College Students' Innovative Training Project (201210290063), The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2011QNA01), A Project Funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (SZBF2011-6-B35), Social Sciences Foundation of Jiangsu Province (10JD019), China University of Mining and Technology Youth Sciences Foundation High-level Talents and Young Teachers "Qihangjihua" Project (20105093) for the financial support.

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg