Exploring the relationship between new-type urbanization and sustainable urban land use: Evidence from prefecture-level cities in China

Abstract

The rapid development of urbanization has driven irreversible changes in land use, the Chinese government has adopted ‘the National New-type Urbanization Plan’ focusing on rational utilization of resources, which will be of great significance effect to the sustainability, rational and intensive land use. This article built indicator systems to measure the level of new-type urbanization and the sustainability of land use by using the full permutation polygon synthetic indicator method and analyzed the relationship between the new-type urbanization and sustainable land use by using panel data model from 2002 to 2016 in 203 prefecture-level cities in China. Assessment results showed that there were serious problems of insufficient efficiency of land use in most cities and far behind the level of new-type urbanization. This indicated that the quality of current urbanization was low quality as the urban sprawled frequently and exceed the quality, and the coordinated development of urbanization and sustainable land use has not been achieved. The results of econometric model showed that new-type urbanization has a significant positive impact on land use, which implied that the implementation of the policy has not reduced the sustainability of land use, but played a significant role in improving it. Therefore, the current main task is to explore an intensive, efficient, ecological, rural-urban integration and harmonious urbanization way to pursue a harmonious relationship between urbanization and sustainable land use.