Research On Chinese Urban Sprawl And Its Control

The urban sprawl appears most early in the developed country. With the fast development of economy and enhancement of urbanization rate, the urban frame expands unceasingly, and finally the urban begins to expand with a low density. The urban sprawl not only invades a lot of the arable land, but also creates many negative influences on the society, environment, economy and people's health. To control urban sprawl and promote"smart growth"has become an important strategy of governing city in many countries.Since the reform and open policy, many Chinese cities begin to appear the urban sprawl tendency gradually. The result showed that some of the Chinese cities has had the tendency to expand with low density through urban sprawl index analysis, the features mainly manifest in the below aspects: the arable land reduces suddenly with urban expansion; the speed of urban expansion is much higher than the speed of urban population growth; the per capita land use exceeds the allowed figure seriously, the urban land use is extensive; the density of urban construction is not high, urban volume rate is lower; the investment of road speeds up, but the public transportation lags behind. These features exhibited some unreasonable phenomena in China such as rapidly expanding, extensive land use and unreasonable urban structure, which will lead the urban sprawl to be more serious and eventually cause a series of problems. We found the main reasons causing urban sprawl includes economy, government, planning, management and policy through analysis, which leads to the obvious difference between Chinese urban sprawl and the other countries as well. Therefore, we need to consider the Chinese characters when controlling the urban sprawl.In order to control urban sprawl the"smart growth"was adopted by many foreign countries. The"smart growth"includes many measures such as Urban Growth Boundary (UGB), Infill Development (ID) and Transit Oriented Development (TOD), which have great practical significance to control Chinese urban sprawl. The study manifests China has some prominent problems: lacking of control to the developing boundary, extensive urban land use and unreasonable urban structure. In order to solve these problems, we can set the urban growth boundary, infill internal urban space and develop the public transit, which not only can control Chinese urban sprawl and protect the arable land, but also can promote reasonable land use, constrain the urban expansion and ensure Chinese sustainable development.Finally, the situation of urban sprawl in Zhen Zhou city was analyzed through the urban sprawl measure methods: fractal dimension, expansion strength, expansion index, and advices were provided on how to avoid Zhen Zhou urban sprawl according to"smart growth".