The Effect of Urban-Suburban Interaction on Urbanization and Suburban Ecological Security: A Case Study of Suburban Wuhan, Central China

Yasi Tian,Lei Wang

doi:10.3390/su12041600

Abstract

In developing countries like China, urbanization is still occurring at a rapid pace. During urbanization, the urban land expands drastically, which makes suburbs the most affected area facing urban expansion. The land transition has proven to threaten the function and security of ecosystems, and therefore the topics of suburban land transition and ecological security have raised much attention. However, the urban-suburban interaction, which is one of the basic characteristics of suburbs, has been insufficiently considered. The urban-suburban interaction is developed based on the flows of people, materials, and information between urban and suburban areas, and it essentially reveals the relationship between human activities and land-use optimization. To fill the research gap, this study adopts a case study of Wuhan city, and first quantifies the urban-suburban interactions from a symbiotic perspective, and investigates rural residents and public buses to verify the estimated interactions. The results show that there is obvious heterogeneity in urban-suburban interactions in different suburban towns. Correlation analysis and geographic weight regression are then applied to demonstrate the relationship between the urban-suburban interaction and urbanization in the suburbs. Additionally, urbanization potential in the suburbs is estimated. Then, a suburban ecological security assessment is conducted by a “pressure-status-response” (PSR) model, and the urbanization potential that is estimated based on urban-suburban interaction is integrated as a “pressure” indicator. The comparison between the suburban ecological security assessment results based on considering and not considering urban-suburban interaction demonstrates the importance of considering urban-suburban interaction. This study contributes to the understanding of the complicated relationships of urban-suburban socio-economic, spatial, and ecological environments, and offers suggestions for suburban planning and ecological protection.

Highlights

Suburbs are defined either as adjacent areas of a city or as separate areas but within commuting distance of the city [1]
The results showed that the PSR model that considered the urban-suburban interaction identified more areas with low ecological security compared with the result that did not consider the interaction
The ecological pressure evaluation caused the differences in the estimation results, and the results show that the model that considers the urban-suburban interaction can figure out more areas with low ecological security

Summary

Introduction

Suburbs are defined either as adjacent areas of a city or as separate areas but within commuting distance of the city [1]. Many primary and secondary factories are wildly distributed in the suburbs to provide producing materials; on the other hand, some people settle in the suburbs but work in the near urban areas, which develops the commuting pattern of “set off in the morning and come back at night” between urban and suburban areas. Urbanization is occurring at a rapid pace and is accompanied by fast urban land expansion. During this process, a large amount of ecological land transits into the urban area, including natural land and cropland [6,7,8]. Land transition in the suburbs in both developing and developed countries is on the scarification of ecological land, which is fundamental to maintaining ecological security [14]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion