Spatiotemporal variations of land urbanization and socioeconomic benefits in a typical sample zone: A case study of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal

摘要

With rapid urbanization and industrialization, a substantial amount of rural land has been converted to urban land. Land urbanization has great socioeconomic benefits but also leads to imbalances in regional cities. In this work, an urban strip way to study the relationship between the land urbanization and socioeconomic benefits of cities is introduced. The research object includes 21 cities connected by the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, which are used to analyze the spatiotemporal variations of land urbanization and socioeconomic benefits from 1990 to 2015, and explores the human-land effect mechanism using the coupling coordination model and the geographically weighted regression model. The results show that cities with higher land urbanization, including Beijing, Suzhou, and Wuxi, can have greater socioeconomic benefits and coupling coordination degrees than other cities. However, Beijing's driving effect on the surrounding cities is obviously weaker than that of Suzhou and Wuxi, and the socioeconomic benefits of market-driven land urbanization in the south of China are more sustained than those of government-driven land urbanization in the north. Thus, the urban scrip study clearly shows the differences between the cities and makes the spatial comparison of cities easier, which provides a new idea for effect mechanism of unbalanced urban development, and has important value for encouraging the coordinated development of regional cities.