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Abstract
China has been experiencing rapid urbanization since the economic reforms and open-up in the late 1970s, with the expansion and restructuring of existing cities taking place at an unprecedented pace, as well as the emergence of many new cities. However, it remains a challenge for urban planners and decision-makers to identify and assess the suitability of areas for future urban development. Building on previous studies, this paper presents a novel approach using an Entire-Array-Polygon (EAP) method to assess the urban development suitability in the fast developing city-region in China. A suitability indicator system was developed to reflect the environmental and economic conditions as well as the living conditions of residents. A major advantage of the EAP model is that it does not rely on the assignment of weight ages for different indicators. Instead, all factors are mapped against one standardised platform. An application of the EAP model in Ezhou, a medium-scale city adjacent to the provincial capital city of Wuhan in Hubei Province, China, over a 15-year period (1998-2012) shows a differentiated suitability evolution for urban development in its three districts, Echeng, Huarong and Liangzihu. While Echeng remains most suitable for urban development, its development suitability decreased sharply from 1998 to 2009, indicating limited space for further growth. In contrast, the suitability in Huarong increased significantly attributed to rapid development of Gedian Economic and Technological Development Zone, while Liangzihu district experienced marginal increase in urban development suitability due to limited land space as well as the conservation of the Liangzi Lake. Our application demonstrates that the EAP method is effective in assisting planners to assess urban development suitability and identify potentials for future development.
Highlights
In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population lived in urban areas (UNPF, 2007)
In China, the rate of urbanization has been accelerating since its economic reforms and open-up in the late 1970 s (Deng et al, 2008); the urban population in China has been increasing by 1315 million per year since 1978
With regard to urban development, various approaches have been developed to evaluate a suite of land suitability attributes, where the most common approaches are the GIS based Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) and the expert-led Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach (Chandio et al, 2011; Dong et al, 2008; Jain and Subbaiah, 2007; Kumar and Shaikh, 2012; Liu et al, 2014; Malczewski, 2006; Youssef et al, 2010)
Summary
In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population lived in urban areas (UNPF, 2007). The number of prefecture-level cities increased from 98 in 1978 to 286 in 2013 (NBSC, 1978; 2014) and urban built-up areas have been expanding continuously at over six percent per annum since the mid-1980 s (Lu, 2011). This rapid urbanization has imposed significant pressures on the environment and the limited natural resources (Jago-on et al, 2009) and achieving sustainable development goals in China and globally by identifying and assessing land that is most. New methods such as spatially-explicit sensitivity analysis (Xu and Zhang, 2013) and BackPropagation (BP) Neural Network method (Xu et al, 2011) have been applied to validate and calibrate the Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques in order to evaluate land suitability for urban development
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