Abstract
Construction land expansion often occurs on cultivated land in developing countries during rapid urbanization and industrialization. Understanding its characteristics and driving mechanisms is of great significance for land-use policy and sustainable development. This paper depicted the spatio-temporal patterns of China’s urban–rural expansion and its occupation of cultivated land based on national land survey data from 1996 to 2006. It further explored the influencing mechanism of cultivated land occupation for urban–rural construction land. The results showed that the establishment and expansion of various economic development zones contribute to more than half of the occupation of cultivated land while the expansion of cities and towns is relatively slower, and their sources of construction land are more diverse. The empirical results showed that (1) economic growth and investment play key roles in shaping the spatio-temporal patterns of the occupation of cultivated land for urban–rural construction land, and (2) the mechanisms of cultivated land occupation in different stages of regional development are different. In particular, the establishment of national economic development zones is conducive to the intensive use of construction land and the protection of cultivated land in inland regions, whereas provincial economic development zones have led to a waste of land resources in coastal regions. Based on the results, this study suggested that the policies to the intensive use of land resources and cultivated land protection required regional disparities.
Highlights
Land-use change is a globally heated topic [1], among which construction land expansion and cultivated land loss are two key subjects that receive the most academic attention
Urbanization and rural industrialization are conducive to the intensive use of urban– rural construction land while the export-oriented development model will increase the dependence of construction land expansion on the occupation of cultivated land
The regression results showed that the impact of the industrialization model on the intensive use of urban–rural construction land is not in line with expectations, i.e., the extensive expansion of construction land is not reflected in areas where the secondary industry is growing rapidly but concentrated in areas with a high share of tertiary industry
Summary
Land-use change is a globally heated topic [1], among which construction land expansion and cultivated land loss are two key subjects that receive the most academic attention. In developing countries, the expansion of construction land drives and signifies the structural change of land use during rapid urbanization and industrialization [2,3,4]. Previous studies have widely explored the driving forces of construction land expansion and its occupation of cultivated land, such as economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization. The expansion of construction land is fundamentally driven by economic growth and the accompanying population agglomeration [9,10]. Both productive activities and residents’ living have demands for construction land. The land-use efficiency of cities is believed to be higher owing to agglomeration economies [16]
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