Barbara Bao
Economics 145
Professor Becker
October 2, 2010
Literature Review: Urban Sprawl in China
Introduction
Urban sprawl refers to the outward expansion of cities and suburbs to lower density
outskirts or development on rural land and the advantages and disadvantages associated with this
type of spatial expansion. Urban sprawl is typically the result lower transportation costs and the selfsorting of the population. These sorting effects are best characterized by those that pull people out
of urban areas because of desirable features of the suburbs and those that push people out of urban
areas because of inner city problems.
Urban sprawl in the United States is a result of the increasing trend toward suburbanization
following World War II. Rising incomes and lowered transportation costs have pushed a portion of
city dwellers to move out of the city as the excessive rates of this growth lead to a plethora of
problems in the industrial inner city, including traffic congestion, air pollution, loss of open space
amenities, unequal public goods and services, racial segregation and tension, poverty and crime
(Nechyba and Walsh, 2004).
Much criticism of urban sprawl began in the late 1990s, characterizing the excessive urban
expansion is essentially an economic inefficiency which has caused the encroachment of rural land
and open space, contributed to the decay of the central city, and is against the idea of sustainable
development. Purposed solutions of urban sprawl include New Urbanism and Smart Growth and
generally focus on policy oriented solutions.
1. Urban Sprawl in a Chinese Context
Unlike in the United States, China’s suburbanization and urban sprawl was nonexistent until
1978, the year which marked the beginning of China’s gaige kaifang or economic reform and opendoor policy. Prior to 1978, land was public property so that no market forces were involved in these
transfers. Furthermore, the government strictly limited the rural-to-urban migration and in general,
China had limited capital to invest in urban development projects (Zhang, 2000).
Most Chinese cities are best characterized by the monocentric city model as most cities are
still undersized, meaning they have not reached their peak agglomeration size (Pan and Zhang, 2002).
Furthermore, the Chinese population is almost completely homogenous so that the “flight from
blight” theory does not apply and public transportation is still the main mode of transportation
although cars are becoming increasingly popular with the nouvelle rich in China. While the
proportion of the Chinese urban population in 2006 was only 43.9%, a figure that the United States
surpassed in 1920 (Qi and Lu, 2008), the number of mega-cities, cities with more than 1 million
residents, has increased from 13 (in 1978) to 37 in 1998 (Cheng and Masser, 2003) so that urban
sprawl is an increasing problem in China.
1.1 Causes of Urban Sprawl in China
Urban sprawl in China is mainly a product of low-density urbanization. Higher income
residents actually stay in the central city, where the environment and public services are better while
those who cannot afford the higher housing costs are forced to live in the suburban fringes in poorly
constructed low density area. The spatial area of the cities grows faster than the population, resulting
in the same low density sprawl found in the United States. Encroachment of farmland and open
space is similarly a problem. For example, China’s cultivated land per capita decreased from 1800 m 2
to 1133 m 2 from 1949 to 1995 (Cheng and Masser, 2003).
Urban sprawl in China was first conceptualized in the early 1980s by Fung. Fung (1981)
postulated that urban sprawl in China was a direct result of internal economic changes by the
government that resulted in the spread of economic activities into peripheral areas. He attributed
this sprawl to the government’s “squandering behavior and emulation of soviet regulations in land
development (Deng and Huang, 2004) and identified the urban land use change and the
restructuring of socialist cities as primary causes.
Unlike in the West, neither of these types of urban expansion can be entirely explained by
the traditional theories of either normal suburbanization or excessive urban expansion. The two
primary forms of Chinese-style urban sprawl are overdeveloped development zones and
underdeveloped semi-urbanized villages. They are the result of China’s institutional environment on
the urban fringe.
Development zones are areas that local Chinese governments have created that are often
large and discontinuous from cities and characterized by leap frog development concentrated in one
direction. Despite the money and effort channeled into these development zones, the results are
dubious. The two approaches on development zones are to take development zones at face value
and examine their effectiveness or to examine the real estate speculation and farmland loss
associated with the establishment of development zones. Semi-urbanized villages are characterized
by low density and the lack of urban infrastructure. Typically, the physical environment and urban
services of these areas are not fully urbanized despite the fact that the residents of these areas live an
urban lifestyle and work urban jobs. Population growth is not accommodated by new development
so illegal and unprofessional housing is constructed by the residents, hence the name “village”
(Deng and Huang, 2004).
2 Techniques and Case Studies
2.1 The Case of Beijing
Fang et al. (2007) developed a geo-spatial indices system measuring sprawl in Beijing that
showed that non-agricultural land in Beijing is growing in a “low efficiency and disordered spatial
configuration” (476) that characterizes typical urban sprawl. The study looked at 13 indexes: area
(AI), shape (SI), discontinuous development (DDI), strip development (SDI), leapfrog development
(LDI), planning consistency (PCI), horizontal density (HDI), vertical density (VDI), population
density (PDI), GDP density (GDI), agriculture impact (AII), open space impact (OII), and traffic
impact (TII). The formula used was:
USI=−0.02[AI]+0.02[SI]+0.08[DDI]−0.09[SDI]+0.10[LDI]+0.14[PCI]−0.05[HDI]−0.05[VDI]
−0.05[PDI]−0.05[GDI] +0.12[AII] +0.12[OII] +0.12[TII], where USI is the integrated urban sprawl
index (473). Source data for the study came from a variety of land use maps, former land use
planning, land price, and floor-area-ratio samples, digitized maps of highways and city centers,
population and GDP statistical data amongst others. While these indices can quantify the impact of
urban sprawl on arable land loss, open space loss, and traffic congestion, other impacts such as
energy consumption can be quantified due to data limitations. Fang et al. identified four sprawl
patterns: random expansion at the fringe, strip development along or between highways, scattered
development of land, and leapfrog development of urban and industrial areas. The study also found
that the amount of sprawl was greater in the northern portion of Beijing than that of the southern
portion but that the sprawl extent was far more severe in the south.
2.2 The Case of Guangzhou
Yu and Ng (2007) processed four sets of images using ERDAS IMAGINE software which
involved geometric correction, unsupervised and supervised classification, and GIS reclassification.
They were later corrected for errors to a Gauss-Kruger projection. Land use was then classified into
cultivated land, orchard, forest, urban built up area, new development area, and water. In this study,
the growth rate of urban area was used to quantify the distribution and intensity of expansion and
the variations of urban built-up areas and new developments were used to study the sprawl in
Guangzhou. This annual urban growth of urban built-up area can be compared using the different
distances along the transects of each block of area.
Annual urban growth =
UA𝑖+𝑛 − UA𝑖
𝑛
, where n is the interval of time in years and UAi+n and UAi are
the urban built-up areas in the target area blocks at time i + 1 and i, respectively (104). The results
showed that “urban expansion in Guangzhou clearly demonstrated a diffusion-coalescence process
with a multi-nucleated urban pattern” (107). There was a higher fragmentation at the urban fringes
or in new urban areas. The results also showed Guangzhou’s development pushing southward unlike
the traditional northern expansion due to the establishment of the Nansha Economic and
Technological Development Zone in 1993 that caused an influx of FDI and local government
policies such as the 1991 Provisional Regulation of the Land Rights over State-owned Land in Cities
and Towns that caused land prices to influence land market development in China. The study
illustrates the importance of combining temporal data and gradient analysis.
Conclusion:
Urban sprawl is a problematic side effect of rapid urban growth and development across the
entire world. A number of policies in China contribute to urban sprawl, including interplay between
state and market, foreign direct investment and foreign investment in the real estate industry, state
policies regarding organization and planning, housing reform, and urban planning transition before
and after land reform (Cheng and Masser, 2003). However, it is an especially dangerous signal for
China because of scarcity of farmland and open space compared to the United States and other
countries (Qi and Lu, 2008). Because of the magnitude of growth and expansion in China, the
consumption of oil, congestion, and pollution is a much more serious problem with regards to the
idea of sustainable development.
References:
Zhang, Tingwei. (2000). Land market forces and government's role in sprawl: The case of China,
Cities, Volume 17, Issue 2, April 2000, Pages 123-135.
Qi, Lei and Lu, Bin. (2008). Urban sprawl: A case study of Shenzhen, China. 44th ISOCARP
Congress 2008.
Deng, F. Frederic and Huang, Youqin. (2004). Uneven land reform and urban sprawl in China: The
case of Beijing, Progress in Planning 3-2004, pp. 211–236.
Cheng, J., Masser, I. (2003). Urban growth pattern modeling: a case study of Wuhan City, PR China.
Landscape and Urban Planning, Volume 62, Issue 4, 25 February 2003, Pages 199-217.
Fang, Jiang, Shenghe, Liu and Hong, Yuan. (2007). “Measuring urban sprawl in Beijing with geospatial indices”, Journal of Geographical Sciences, 17, 469-478.
Yu, Xi Jun and Ng, C. N. (2007). “Spatial and temporal dynamics of urban sprawl next term along
two previous term urban next term–rural transects: A case study of Guangzhou, China.” Landscape
and Urban Planning, 79, 96-109.
Nechyba, Thomas and Walsh, Randall. (2004). “Urban Sprawl.” Journal of Economic Perspectives –
Volume 18, Number 4, Fall 2004, pgs 177-200).
Pan, Z., Zhang, F., (2002). Urban productivity in China. Urban Studies 39 (12), 2267–2281.
Yeh, Ago and Li, X. (1999). Economic development and agricultural land loss in the Pearl River
Delta, China. Habitat International 23 1999, pp. 373–390.