Abstract
Land use mix (LUM) has long been employed as one of the key methods to improve urban vibrancy and optimize built-up areas. Within the urban studies discipline, LUM is usually defined as a functional compatible but diverse land use pattern. However, its quantitative methodological approaches thereby heavily rely on the diversity of land use and fail to consider functional compatibility as another critical defining characteristic, providing only a partial picture of land use pattern. Thus, reviewing LUM’s concepts and definitions, this paper develops a new index to describe functional compatibility according to the spatial segregation measurements. To evaluate and provide empirical evidence of the proposed index, this paper selects the medium-sized city of Xiangtan as a case study. The findings demonstrate that Xiangtan exhibits a quite compatible land use pattern to a certain extent. In addition, particular clusters with relatively incompatible land use patterns are observed, which are closely linked to a special historical working unit, the ‘Danwei’ compounds, and a special rural planning authority, ‘Township-Village-Enterprise’, in China. Finally, an integrated evaluation is conducted based on the proposed index and Shannon entropy index, which can be regarded as a useful tool in future land use planning while contributing to shaping a sustainable form of urban development.
Highlights
Land use mix (LUM) has long been regarded as a heated topic among urban planners.After World War II, with the accelerating urbanization and its consequent restructuring of the socio-economic relations, the complexity of the city has gradually emerged and been noticed by urban scholars [1,2,3,4,5]
ThDuetsa,ilas anreewdecmlaonssstirfaicteadtiionnF,ighueraed6-atnadilTbarbeleak3.s proposed by Jiang is adopted for provi ing a gTrabelaet3e.rDpesrcercipitsivioenstaotifsttichseoftaFCrgDeI tveadluedsaotfap.arBceylsiimn tphelesmtudeynatrienag. the new method, this stud has created eight partitioning thresholds and divided all the parcels’ FCDI values in nine classes
Despite LUM being depicted as a functional compatible but diverse land use pattern by Jacobs and New Urbanists, most of its measurements start from the perspectives of diversity of land uses [6,24,25,27,51,52] while ignoring functional compatibility between land uses
Summary
Land use mix (LUM) has long been regarded as a heated topic among urban planners. After World War II, with the accelerating urbanization and its consequent restructuring of the socio-economic relations, the complexity of the city has gradually emerged and been noticed by urban scholars [1,2,3,4,5]. Many scholars and urban thinkers started to argue that the widespread adoption of the zoning concept with “functional separation” necessarily resulted in a monotonous, isolated urban environment to a certain extent [6] Addressing these new barriers to designing and planning the built environment, Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities proposed that the built environment, incorporating the mixture of land uses into it, is an essential element of the urban diversity which should be treated as the necessary precondition for enhancing urban vitality [7]. The ever-increasing urban sprawl has been associated with serious interferences of incompatible land uses in the urban and sub-urban areas (e.g. residence and industry), triggering the exacerbation of environmental degradations [23] To tackle these issues, some scholars have argued that a healthy, reciprocal or, in other words, functional compatible LUM pattern is a possible strategy [15,23,24], since it can achieve Jacob’s ideal urban form and effectively improve urban vibrancy. All the land types are considered in the measurement, the non-built-up land, such as farmlands and forests, which helps to explicitly explore “repulsions” that are imperceptible, e.g., the incompatibility between the heavy industries and farmlands, in the suburban areas
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