Towards balanced development stage: Regulating the spatial pattern of agglomeration with collaborative optimal allocation of urban land

Abstract

Urban agglomeration is an important carrier that promotes urbanization into an advanced stage, addressing its unbalanced development is an important task for the newly established territorial spatial planning in China. This research proposed a collaborative optimal allocation of urban land (COAUL) model which provides a simulation tool both for the quantity and spatial structure optimization of urban agglomeration. COAUL first optimizes the quantity structures of every city according to the current situation, potential development capacity and spatial policy. And then the optimized quantity structure is assigned into geo-space with land use spatial optimization model. COAUL has been applied to Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), a fast-developing urban agglomeration located in Southern China, and three main findings are obtained: (1) COAUL model can optimize the quantity and spatial structure of urban agglomeration for the goal of balanced development, which could provide scientific reference scenario for the delimitation of the urban agglomerations growth boundaries (UAGB). (2) As cities in urban agglomeration have strong connections with each other, collaborative optimal allocation of urban land could considerably relieve the pressures of developed central cities and also promote the growth of undeveloped edge cities. (3) COAUL can unlimitedly reduce the imbalanced development tendency of urban agglomeration, which is performance better than traditional land use planning models. This research demonstrated that delimiting the UAGB with COAUL model is an important government measure for promoting the balanced development of urban agglomeration areas.