Abstract
The State Council of the People’s Republic of China issued the National Territory Spatial Planning Outline (2016–2030), which is a fundamental guide and blueprint for China to achieve its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Based on its sustainable-city initiatives, this paper establishes a “four-space (4S)” assessment framework, and measured the urban development quality (UDQ) of 336 cities in China. Then we analyzed the spatial patterns of UDQ, and identified the main obstacles. Our results show that there is considerable room for improvement in UDQ in China. The spatial pattern of UDQ shows that the eastern economic zone score is higher than the western score and the northern lower than the southern. The spatial efficiency, structure, and quality in Chinese cities have significant hierarchical structure, while the form pattern is complicated. The most important obstacle to China’s high-quality development is spatial efficiency. The most significant limiting indicator is the industrial structure, followed by land output level and land consumption per unit GDP. Our findings help enhance the effectiveness of National Territory Spatial Planning policy implementation and guide China’s urban planning and management to achieve sustainability.
Highlights
Cities have become an important part of human civilization and urban high-quality development is a key issue for sustainable development [5]
With a focus on “space”, we have identified the elements of the Territorial Spatial Planning Initiative that relate to urban development quality (UDQ)
Equity orientation reflected in the spatial dimension is the requirement to achieve common regional development
Summary
According to the World Development Indicators (WDI) database published by the. World Bank, the proportion of urban population reached 55.72% in 2019 [1] and is expected to reach 68% in 2050 [2]. In 2015, the United Nations (UN) adopted Changing the World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which identified 17 universal sustainable development goals to address the pressing environmental, political, and economic challenges facing our world (UN 2015). It has since established a global indicator framework of nearly 200 indicators, including 15 for urban development [6]. Urbanization is a complex systems problem, and a fixed framework cannot solve the problem of differentiation in each region [7,8,9]
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