Abstract
China has undergone rapid urbanization in the past few decades, and it has been accompanied by overdevelopment. Residential vacancies caused by overdevelopment result in a waste of resources and generate greenhouse gases associated with land surface changes. Due to the poor spatial resolution and limited availability of data, previous studies performed analyses at low resolutions at the county scale, thus lacking spatial detail. In addition, they used complicated subjective indicators difficult to apply to cities of various sizes across China. To understand the detailed spatial pattern of residential vacancies in megacities, we designed a more generally applicable approach with multisource high-resolution spatiotemporal data and tested it in Beijing, the capital of China. At first, a statistical regression with features derived from multisource data was used. Then, the predicted values of the regression function were used as standard heat values, and the observed heat value in each unit was divided by the corresponding standard heat value. Next, residential vacancies were estimated by calculating the quantiles of these division results in all analysis units. This approach requires no prior knowledge or complicated indicators and can be easily applied across cities in China, which is beneficial for development planning at the provincial and national levels.
Highlights
In the past three decades, China has witnessed unprecedented urbanization and land expansion [1]
The mapping results for VE, VL, and LE are illustrated in Figure 10b–d, respectively
When there is a lack of nighttime light data or residential vacancies are explored at a higher spatial resolution, the VE method is recommended
Summary
In the past three decades, China has witnessed unprecedented urbanization and land expansion [1]. The number of cities increased from 223 to over 660, with the rate of urbanization rising from 20 percent to above 60 percent [4,5,6]. Such rapid and large-scale urbanization has created notable challenges involving environmental and social problems, such as overcrowding, poverty, inequality, environmental damage/degradation, deteriorating health, ecological destruction, deteriorating infrastructure, employment issues, social security issues, bubbles in the real estate industry and ghost cities [7]. Ghost cities have very low population densities, high housing vacancy rates and low nighttime luminosities [9]
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