In the context of tax sharing reform and land reform during the 1990s, local governments in China relied heavily on land finance. Local governments have fierce competition in attracting investment, omitting the development of green economy. Based on the data of industrial land sales and carbon dioxide emissions, this study constructed the panel data of 196 cities in China from 2007 to 2017 and analyzed the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of urban industrial land price distortion and carbon emission intensity.

With continuous rises in GDP, land cover in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) has undergone a drastic change over the period 1990–2018. In this study, land use in the GBA was divided into six types: farmland, forestland, grassland, wetland, construction land, and unused land. We analyzed changes in spatiotemporal patterns according to region and type by using statistical analysis, spatial clustering, and hotspot analysis, focusing on the spatial characteristics of areas where land-use types changed with high frequency.

Baseflow is an essential component of runoff, which is the dominant water resource for the dry season. To better manage water resources, it is vital to investigate the links between the multiple influencing factors and the baseflow for better prediction in light of global changes. Previous studies have seldom separated these influencing factors in the analysis, making it difficult to determine their effect on the baseflow.

Global environmental changes are multifactorial and affected by multiple forms of land use. For this reason, and also in view of the current world climate scenario, they have become highly relevant and are subject to analysis and discussions on the best uses of land. The research presented here offers a systematic analysis on the priorities related to the multiple uses of land and their implications in urban planning. An exploratory and descriptive analysis is used with a qualitative approach based in a systematic literature review.

This paper explores the specific “authoritarian” type of adaptive governance of urban regeneration using the example of Guangzhou city as the frontier of China’s reforms. As opposed to the “democratic” type of adaptive governance with its bottom-up policy initiations, community autonomy, polycentric power, participation in decision making, and self-organized policy actors, adaptive governance in Guangzhou is based on top-down decision making and implementation of public authorities’ solutions with the high role of political considerations.

With the intensification of the contradiction between living space and population growth, it is necessary to improve the effectiveness of urban residential land allocation. This study systematically reviews 169 papers following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol to collect and collate the contributing factors that affecting the supply of and demand for urban residential land for different countries, and a statistical analysis of long-term series data is conducted to further verify the rationality of the contributing factors.

The quantitative urban system structure in historical periods and the long time-scale urban land area grid dataset with spatial attributes are important for land use and land cover change (LUCC) research. In this study, we aimed to measure the area of county level and above cities in mainland China in the 1930s, also known as the traditional Chinese era (TCE), using a geographic information system (GIS) model and 1:50,000 military topographic maps.

With rapid urban population growth and industrial agglomeration, the urban land supply is becoming gradually tight. Improving land use quality (LUQ) is becoming increasingly critical. This study was carried out in the Luohe built-up zones between 2013 and 2021. The aim is to explore the growth characteristics of LUQ and determine the association between the inner urban location and the growth rate from the perspective of spatial heterogeneity.

It is common to see urban land expansion worldwide, and its characteristics, mechanisms, and effects are widely known. As socio-economic transition and the change of land use policies may reverse the trend of urban expansion, in-depth research on the process of urban land use change is required. Through a process perspective, this paper reveals the change paths, development stages, and spatial patterns of urban residential land use with data from 323 cities in China from 2009 to 2016.

The urban agglomeration at the Yangtze River Delta is one of the six most developed and populated urban agglomerations in the world. In recent years, with accelerating urbanization, the land use has changed significantly. Excessive construction aggravates ecological fragility. In this context, this paper first investigates the evolutionary processes and layout of the ecological space in the Yangtze River Delta. The root causes of various problems are then analyzed. Finally, suggestions for further improvement in both detailed tasks and governance aspects are proposed.

Assessing the impacts and drivers of urban expansion on terrestrial carbon storage (TCS) is important for urban ecology and sustainability; however, a unified accounting standard for carbon intensity and research on the drivers and economic value of TCS changes are lacking. Here, urban expansion and TCS in the Yangtze River Delta were simulated based on Patch-generating Land Use Simulation and Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs models; scenario simulation; Literature, Correction, Ratio, Verification carbon intensity measurement; and land use transfer matrix methods.

Urbanization is one of the major threats to the dynamic inheritance of the agricultural heritage system (AHS). The ability to achieve sustainable development in intra-urban areas is an essential proposition related to the innovation of AHS conservation principles. The Haizhu high bed-low ditch agroecosystem (HHBLDA), a China-Nationally Important Agricultural Heritage System site located at the center of Guangzhou City, is taken as an example in this study.