Delimiting Urban Growth Boundary through Combining Land Suitability Evaluation and Cellular Automata

Qing Zheng,Ke Wang,Muye Gan,Melanie Weston,Amir Shahtahmassebi,Lingyan Huang,Xuan Yang

doi:10.3390/su9122213

Abstract

China’s domestic urban planning only worked on researches of urban space control, the scope definition of urban development is not clear enough. The purpose of this study is to present a new urban growth boundary (UGB) delimitation method which combined land suitability evaluation (LSE) and cellular automata (CA). This method gave credence to LSE’s advantage in sustainable land use, and CA’s advantage in objective dynamic simulation. The ecological limitation areas were defined by LSE, which were regarded as the restricted areas of urban growth; meanwhile, it was taken as an important model input to guide intensive land allocation in urban growth model (CA model). The future urban growth scenarios were predicted by CA model and the corresponding UGB lines were delineated by ArcGIS 10.1. The results indicated that this method had good performance in Ningbo’s urban growth simulation. When compared to the planned UGB in urban master planning, the simulated UGBs under port development and regulated scenarios showed more intensive and suitable spatial layout of land. Besides, the simulated UGB under regulated scenario had the most reasonable space structure and the largest ecological protection effect among the UGBs. Hence, the simulated UGBs were superior to the planned UGB. The study recommends that this UGB delimitation method can promote sustainability of land development and ecological environment in Chinese cities.

Highlights

Since China’s reform and opening up policy came into effect in the late 1970s, the country has witnessed an unparalleled period of urbanization [1,2,3]
Unsuitable regions covered an area of 3648.74 km2, where it gathered around the hills in southwest areas, southern areas of the central city, and the junction areas of Ninghai and Xiangshan Counties
land suitability evaluation (LSE) yielded suitability zoning maps of a single index, which was divided into three categories: natural factor maps, socio-economic factor maps, and ecological safety factor maps (Figures 5–7)

Summary

Introduction

Since China’s reform and opening up policy came into effect in the late 1970s, the country has witnessed an unparalleled period of urbanization [1,2,3]. To alleviate the adverse effects of blind expansion of cities, as well as to promote sustainable development, many scholars have designed and applied plentiful planning policies and decision-making tools, such as land-use zoning system, urban growth boundary (UGB), and the China urban land system reform [7,8]. Among these policies and tools, UGB is the most commonly used tool to shape reasonable urban internal space and protect ecological and agricultural space from being developed. It is worth noting that the UGB mentioned in this study includes urban growth areas within the boundary and boundary lines

Objectives

Results

Conclusion