Illustrated with an empirical study on the evaluation of urban land utilization efficiency (ULUE) of 13 cities in Jiangsu, China, this research develops an efficiency evaluation approach for measuring the ULUE with respect to interacting sustainability-related criteria, using bipolar measurement. The approach proposed in this research incorporates the merits of the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method, a new causal-effect analysis process, the Bi-TOPSIS method, and convergence models. As such, this research addresses three important issues: (a) how to identify key criteria and their interactions for evaluating the ULUE of cities; (b) how to obtain the ULUE performances of cities, with benchmarks that clearly demarcate ‘satisfactory’ from ‘unsatisfactory’ performances, and (c) how to measure the dispersion of the ULUE performances across cities over time. The empirical study suggest that the ULUE of most Jiangsu cities is below the city planner’s expectation. The ULUE of Central Jiangsu cities is better than their neighboring cities, and the cities with low ULUE tend to catch up with higher ULUE cities. However, the gaps between their ULUE performances will still exist. The reasons for these results can be summarized in three aspects. First, the rapidly large-scale urban expansion happened in south Jiangsu is not good for improving ULUE. Second, the secondary and tertiary industries in North Jiangsu are not as good as its neighbors. Third, the cooperation between the cities in Jiangsu does help them to narrow their ULUE gaps. To help cities achieve a better ULUE performance, the corresponding policy suggestions are also recommended for Jiangsu cities.

Picture from http://en.jiangsu.gov.cn/

If you are interested in the research, please read the paper

Ling Zhang, Lei zhang, Yan Xu, et al. Evaluating urban land use efficiency with interacting criteria: An empirical study of cities in Jiangsu China. Land Use Policy, Volume 90, January 2020.

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104292Get rights and content