Abstract
In the context of accelerated urbanization, socioeconomic development, and population growth, as well as the rapid advancement of information and communication technology (ICT), urban land is rapidly expanding worldwide. Unplanned urban growth has led to the low utilization efficiency of land resources. Also, ecological and agricultural lands are continuously sacrificed for urban construction, which in the long-term may severely impact the health of citizens in cities. A thorough understanding of the mechanisms and driving forces of a city’s urban land use changes, including the influence of ICT development, is therefore crucial to the formation of optimal and feasible urban planning in the new era. Taking Nanjing as a study case, this article attempts to explore the measurable “smart” driving indicators of urban land use change and analyze the tapestry of the relationship between these and urban land use change. Different from the traditional linear regression analysis method of driving force of urban land use change, this study focuses on the interaction relationship and the underlying causal relationship among various “smart” driving factors, so it adopts a fuzzy statistical method, namely the grey relational analysis (GRA). Through the integration of literature research and known effective data, five categories of “smart” indicators have been taken as the primary driving factors: industry and economy, transportation, humanities and science, ICT systems, and environmental management. The results show that these indicators have different impacts on driving urban built-up land growth. Accordingly, optimization possibilities and recommendations for development strategies are proposed to realize a “smarter” development direction in Nanjing. This article confirms the effectiveness of GRA for studies on the driving mechanisms of urban land use change and provides a theoretical basis for the development goals of a smart city.
Highlights
The world is currently undergoing tremendous change, and the significant progress in information and communication technology (ICT) increasingly convinces us that the era of smart city has already arrived (Karvonen, Urban Planning, 2020, Volume 5, Issue 1, Pages 129–139Cugurullo, & Caprotti, 2018)
The concept of a smart city aims at the integration of ICT and other new technologies and services to promote smart urban growth; this concept has been placed on the development agenda by policymakers around the world since it was first proposed in the early 21st century (Neirotti, de Marco, Cagliano, Mangano, & Scorrano, 2014)
The overall goal of this study is to discover what the ICT-led driving factors of urban land use change are in the context of smart city development in the studied city of Nanjing
Summary
The world is currently undergoing tremendous change, and the significant progress in information and communication technology (ICT) increasingly convinces us that the era of smart city has already arrived (Karvonen, Urban Planning, 2020, Volume 5, Issue 1, Pages 129–139Cugurullo, & Caprotti, 2018). As highlighted by today’s smart city advocates, ICT will eventually bring together the various service functions of a city into a diverse, complex, interconnected, and manageable system (Cocchia, 2014; Ergazakis, Metaxiotis, & Psarras, 2004). In such a context, how should urban planners incorporate ICT and the concept of a smart city into their development strategies, given the unknown impact of ICT?
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