Brownfield Redevelopment Toward Sustainable Urban Land Use in China

Brownfield redevelopment is a new urban land use strategy to pursue the ideal of sustainable development. It relieves environmental pressure and resolves the glaring contradiction between urban land idleness and urban sprawl. It addresses issues of urban land use and farmland protection in China. This paper compares brownfield with greenfield, and defines brownfield and its redevelopment. It elaborates general and special government policies for this sustainable land use strategy in the context of China. General policies contain two aspects: clarifying brownfield redevelopment's priority in Chinese urban planning and land use and setting a general quantitative redevelopment target. The extent of the government's special policies, which aim at coordinating three factors in the redevelopment process, namely govern- ments, developers and users, are divided into five areas: statistics and categorization, assessment and remediation, fi- nancial supports and tax incentives, environmental and legal liability, and publicity and guidance. The paper concludes the major functions of different levels of Chinese government in the redevelopment process, i.e. making general strategy, formulating legislation, spectifying regulations and technical standards, estimating and categorizing brownfield sites, drawing up brownfield planning, providing information and financial support, guiding developers, publicizing the strategy to the public, and checking reuse results.     

SPATIAL DIFFERENTIATION OF LAND TRANSFER ——Case Study of Shanghai, Nanjing and Taizhou in Changjiang River Delta

1INTRODUCTIONIt is one of important issues in the field of geographical science to analyze the spatial differentiation of regional phenomenon. The research on spatial differentiation can be cast back to Thunen's agricultural location theory. Af- terwards, many scholars developed the theory and paid moreattentiontothelawandformingmechanismofspa- tial differentiation of some phenomena including inhabi- tation structure, population variation, environmental ele- ments, rural development, and …     

Soil Erosion under Different Land Use Types and Zones of Jinsha River Basin in Yunnan Province, China

Severe soil erosion in the middle and upper reaches of Yangtze River has been regarded as a major environmental problem. The on-site impact of soil erosion on agricultural production and the off-site impact on floods and sedimentation in Yangtze Rive are well known. A quantitative assessment of soil erosion intensity is still scanty for developing appropriate soil erosion control measures for different land use types and zohes in this region. This article constructs a localized USLE and estimates the average soil loss in the Jinsha River Region in Yunnan Province, one of the priority areas for soil erosion control in the middle and upper reaches of Yangtze River. The estimation is done under different land uses and zones in this basin. The estimation shows that while soil erosion in the cultivated land is the most severe, 36～40% of the garden and forest land suffers from soil erosion of various degrees due to lack of ground cover and other factors. Soil erosion in the pasture is modest when the ground cover is well maintained. It also confirmed that terracing can reduce soil erosion intensity significantly on the cultivated land. Research findings suggest that sufficient attention must be paid to regeneration of the ground cover in reforestation programs. In addition to mass reforestation efforts, restoration of grassland and terracing of the cultivated land should also play an important role in erosion control.     

Spatio-temporal Analysis of Urban Spatial Interaction in Globalizing China —— A Case Study of Beijing-Shanghai Corridor

This paper aims to explore urban geography with a new perspective. Endowed with the urban geography connotations, an improved data field model is employed to integrate temporal dimension into spatial process of cities in a typical region in this article. Taking the Beijing-Shanghai Corridor including 18 cities as an example, the authors chose the city centricity index (CCI) and the spatial data field model to analyze the evolution process and features of sub-region and urban spatial interaction in this corridor based on the data of 1991, 1996 and 2002. Through the analysis, we found that: 1) with the improvement of the urbanization level and the development of urban economy, the cities' CCI grew, the urban spatial radiative potential enhanced and the radiative range expanded gradually, which reflects the urban spatial interaction's intensity has been increasing greatly; 2) although the spatial interaction intensity among the cities and sub-regions in the Beijing-Shanghai Corridor was growing constantly, the gap of the spatial interaction strength among different cities and sub-regions was widening, and the spatial division between the developed areas and the less developed areas was obvious; and 3) the intensity of the spatial interaction of Beijing, Shanghai and their urban agglomerations was far greater than that in small cities of other parts of the corridor, and it may have a strong drive force on the choice of spatial location of the economic activities.     

Rehabilitation and Sustainable Use Pattern of Rocky-desertified Land in Southwest China＇s Poverty-stricken Karst Mountainous Areas ——A Case Study in Benggu Township, Xichou County, Yunnan, China

The rocky desert in a karst area directly causes the lack of soil, water and forest, hence leading to the poverty there. In 1990, the villagers from the Muzhe Village in Benggu Township, Xichou County, Yunnan declared a war against rocky desert in an attempt to ask the fields for more yields. They invented a distinctive land rehabilitation and sustainable use pattern called ＂transforming heaven and earth＂ that had been practiced in Southwest China＇s karst areas. The key mechanism of the pattern was to develop terraced fields with well conserved soil, water and fertility by exploding rocks in the fields, building stone walls, gathering more soil, and improving soil quality and productivity for the fields in combination with building of irrigation facilities and roads, as well as with forestation and agriculture structure adjustment. The purpose of the pattern was to alleviate poverty in the karst areas by improving soil productivity and promoting agricultural development. A typical area was studied with the help of Participatory Rural Appraisal （PRA） and the pattern was carried out there for fifteen years, have produced excellent ecological benefits and good economic benefits. Its application in the area approved that it was a sustainable land use pattern for rocky desert areas.     

巧划“圈” 找准“点”——韩国首都圈发展规划的演变与启示

京津冀一体化成为当前热门话题,其实早在2004年国家发改委就启动了《京津冀都市圈区域规划》,历经十年迟迟未出台,2014年有望成为破题之年。首都因其特殊的地位,具有很强的人口吸纳魅力,很多国家也曾有过因首都城市病和周边城市发展不均衡等问题,在分散首都功能方面经历了较长时间的探索。其中韩国的首尔首都圈规划在政府主导型国家的首都圈规划中较为典型,对我国编制京津冀首都圈规划,促进京津冀一体化发展具有一定的借鉴意义。