Sustainability Assessment Of Transformation Development In Resource–exhausted City

Due to the limitation and un-renewable nature of mineral resources, the sustainabledevelopment of resource-based cities requires the resource-exhausted cities totransform for survival, and avoid the situation of “exhaustion of minerals and death ofa city”. However, the issues of resource restraint, economic recession and outstandingsocial conflicts make the resource-exhausted cities encounter many difficulties duringthe transition, in order to ensure the sustainability of transitional development, thetracing of the sustainability of transitional development for the resource-exhaustedcities has profound significance for the testing of city transition effect, finding theproblems existing in the transitional development process, and adjusting the thinkingof transition.The thesis discusses the characteristics and sustainability of transitionaldevelopment from multiple perspectives with the sustainable development idea asinstruction, the primarily protecting the ecological safety and the coordinateddevelopment of economics and society as principle, and the land resource as carrier.（1）The resource-exhausted cities have the characteristics of structural andfunctional defects. The system structural defect of resource-exhausted cities includesthe structural defects in nature, economy and society, which are primarily reflected onthe land use structure and economic structure, the functional defect includes the defectsin production, ecological service, carrier, social service, and social function. Byanalyzing the relation between city structural defect and functional defect, it is indicatedthat the sustainable development of transition for the resource-exhausted cities need tobe realized through the adjustment of city structure and the completion of city functions.（2） The transition mechanism of resource-exhausted cities relies on thetheoretical instruction of the sustainable development, life cycle and dissipativestructure. Resource-exhausted cities are in the decline stage of the life cycle for theresource-exhausted cities, their transitional process shows the basic characteristics ofdissipative structure, by adding the “fluctuation” disturbance in the city system that isfar away from the balance status, amplify into huge fluctuation under the non-lineareffect, so as to guide and control the transitional direction of the resource-exhaustedcities.（3）Poor health condition of urban systems. It is found through the LUCCcharacteristics analysis that in the recent20years, the cultivated area has been continuously decreasing, the urban and rural construction areas have been continuouslyincreasing, and the decreasing speed of cultivated area shows the trend of growth;during the period from2000to2010, the ecological footprint keeps growing, theecological carrying capacity slowly declines, and the ecological deficit began to appearsince2004and take on the trend of continuous growth; by2010, the biologicalproduction volume consumed by the development of Jiawang will need9.89years tocomplete based on the land carrying capacity of the year. Urban construction anddevelopment relies on farmland occupation, which seriously exceeds the carryingcapacity of the ecological system, so it is not good for the sustainable development ofcities.（4）Urban system towards the orderly direction development. By the entropyflow model, it reveals that there is the process from negative entropy to positive entropy,and then back to negative entropy in Jiawang during the transformation period. The citysystem has been into orderly development since2006, and the factors influence systemorderly contain scientific and reasonable land resource allocation, capital investment,technical progress and application, labour force structure and so on.（5）Through the coupling factor calculation between land use and urbandevelopment, the coupling factor of Jiawang’s land use and urban development sub-system has been gradually increasing and entered the preliminary coordinativedevelopment stage. Using three-stage method to simulate the logistic curve of therelationship between economic growth and construction area, the study find that thecontribution to economic growth from construction area expansion, which is the reasonof city system coordination increasing slowly.（6）A social survey regarding the closing of mines and city transition indicatedthat the closing of mines have significant influence on the residents in the mining area,which was mainly reflected in the decline of family economic income, and difficulty ofreemployment; the sources of income for families in the non-mining areas wererelatively diversified, so the influence was not very great; currently the most urgentproblems are environment recovery, reemployment of unemployed workers,reclamation of sunk lands, reusing of wasted lands, air purification, recovery oflandscape, etc; the social survey of Jiawang’s transition from resource-exhausted cityindicated that after several years of transitional development, the influence of resourceexhaustion on residents’ production and living would gradually decrease, and therecovery and improvement of ecological environment would have significant effect, the residents suggested that it should keep strengthening the ecological construction, theywere looking forward to the development of the ecological agriculture, tourism industry,high-tech industry and non-pollution industry, and had relatively high participation andsupporting wills on the development of ecological agriculture, tourism industry and thenew-rural area construction.