Analyses on Determinants of Urban Sprawl in China —Based on Empirical Research with Panel Data of 35 Large and Medium Sized Cities

摘要

With accelerating urbanization, there are currently different levels of urban sprawl in China. This paper adopts panel data of 35 representative cities in China between 2000 and 2009 to measure sprawl index, and analyzes empirically determinants of urban sprawl. Results show that, 1) urban sprawl index is positively correlated with urbanization rate and traffic accessibility; 2) there is a reversed Ushaped relationship between urban sprawl index and scale of a city; 3) in the right on this reversed Ushaped curve are 9 metropolitan cities or large cities such as Beijing, Tianjin and so on, whose urban sprawl are improved but urban sprawl index are still quite high; in the transforming period on the curve are four cities including Shenyang, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Chengdu; in the left on the curve are the remaining 22 cities, whose urban sprawl has a worsening trend with expansion of scale of a city. Combined with empirical results, this paper proposes three options for policy making.