Abstract
This paper analyzes the relationship between urban form, shrinking cities, and residential carbon emissions, based on information collected for prefectural-level and above Chinese cities for the years of 2005, 2010, and 2015. After controlling for a number of urban form and socioeconomic variables (e.g., size, compactness, and polycentricity), this paper pays attention to residential carbon emissions in ‘shrinking cities’, which have experienced population loss and are a recent urban phenomenon in China. Everything else being equal, shrinking cities tend to be associated with less energy efficient than their growing counterparts, suggesting that these cities may not only be ‘battling’ with shrinking populations and economies but also need to consider the environmental issues.
Highlights
Sustainable urban form is often conceptualized and pursued as a supplementary solution to carbon emissions reduction in addition to technological and market-based ‘fixes’ [1,2]
This paper analyzes the relationship between urban form, shrinking cities, and residential carbon emissions, based on information collected for prefectural-level and above Chinese cities for the years of 2005, 2010, and 2015
Following Liu et al [30], we identify individual population centers within individual cities and evaluate whether the population is evenly distributed across the population centers: polycentric urban development (POLY) = 1 abs max where POLY denotes the polycentricity of individual cities; abs is the standard deviation of the population size of all the centers within the corresponding city; population centers within individual cities are identified as contiguous densely populated grids in the Landscan dataset (See Liu et al [30] for more details); maxis the standard deviation of population size in a ‘hypothetical’ two-center city, with one center of zero population and the other with ‘maximum’ population
Summary
Sustainable urban form is often conceptualized and pursued as a supplementary solution to carbon emissions reduction in addition to technological and market-based ‘fixes’ [1,2]. The spatial distribution of people, economic activities, and land uses is closely related to residential carbon emissions, most notably through the housing and transportation sectors [1,2,3,4]. Against this backdrop, planning visions such as polycentric urban form and compact cities are often regarded as ideal-typical urban patterns and associated with environmental sustainability [1,5,6]. Further analyses are required to identify whether shrinking cities spur or alleviate environmental challenges [7,8]
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