The Delimitation of Urban Growth Boundaries Using the CLUE-S Land-Use Change Model: Study on Xinzhuang Town, Changshu City, China

Rui Zhou, Hao Zhang, Xin-Yue Ye, Xin-Jun Wang and Hai-Long Su
Additional contact information
Rui Zhou: Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
Hao Zhang: Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
Xin-Yue Ye: Department of Geography, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242, USA
Xin-Jun Wang: Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
Hai-Long Su: Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 11, 1-16

Abstract: Over the past decades, urban growth boundaries (UGBs) have been regarded as effective tools applied by planners and local governments to curb urban sprawl and guide urban smart growth. The UGBs help limit urban development to suitable areas and protect surrounding agricultural and ecological landscapes. At present, China’s Town and Country Planning Act officially requires the delimitation of UGBs in a city master planning outline and in central urban area planning. However, China’s practices in UGBs are usually determined by urban planners and local authorities, and lack a sound analytical basis. Consequently, Chinese UGBs are often proven to be inefficient for controlling urban expansion. In this paper, take the fast-growing Xinzhuang town of Changshu city, eastern China as an example, a new method towards establishing UGBs is proposed based on land-use change model (the Conversion of Land Use and its Effects at Small regional extent, CLUE-S). The results of our study show that the land-use change and urban growth simulation accuracy of CLUE-S model is high. The expansion of construction land and the decrease of paddy field would be the main changing trends of local land use, and a good deal of cultivated land and ecological land would be transformed into construction land in 2009–2027. There is remarkable discordance in the spatial distribution between the simulated UGBs based on the CLUE-S model and the planned UGBs based on the conventional method, where the simulated results may more closely reflect the reality of urban growth laws. Therefore, we believe that our method could be a useful planning tool for the delimitation of UGBs in Chinese cities.

Keywords: urban growth boundaries (UGBs); CLUE-S model; land-use change simulation; Xinzhuang (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/11/1182/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/11/1182/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:8:y:2016:i:11:p:1182-:d:82993

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().