Socio-economic development and land-use change: Analysis of rural housing land transition in the Transect of the Yangtse River, China

Abstract

Rural housing land accounted for 67.3% of China's total construction land in 2000. While there are numerous studies analyzing the loss of arable land due to urban sprawl, less attention has been paid to the study of rural housing land in China. This paper develops a theoretical framework for rural housing land transition in China. It introduces a research method, which is using the spatial differentiation in regional development for compensating the deficiencies in time-series data, to analyze the rural housing land transition in the Transect of the Yangtse River (TYR). Detailed land-use data and socio-economic data from both research institutes and government departments were used to test the following hypothesis on rural housing land transition. We assume that rural housing in every region will undergo specific stages—the proportion of rural housing in the increase of total construction land will decline gradually with the development of the local economy, and the end of the transition corresponds to a new equilibrium between rural housing and other construction activities. Five regional types of rural housing land change were defined according to an aggregation index used to reflect landscape patterns. The outcomes indicated that the share of rural housing in the increase of total construction land declines gradually from the upper reaches to the lower reaches of the Yangtse River, i.e. from Ganzi–Yushu to Luzhou–Diqing, Enshi–Chongqing, Tongling–Yichang and to Shanghai–Chaohu. Each region is in a different phase of the rural housing land transition, which corresponds to a particular socio-economic developmental level. Finally, some policy implications were discussed by applying this research to land management issues. The authors argue that there are problems in the current rural housing land managerial system in China, and that the Central Government needs to define uniform regulations for rural housing according to regional socio-economic developmental level, physical conditions and rural housing land transition phase.