Will the land supply structure affect the urban expansion form?

Existing studies have intensively discussed urban expansion, while relatively less attention has been paid to the impacts of the land supply structure. The aim of this study is to discuss whether diverse land supply structures for residential/commercial and industrial land affect the form of urban expansion by taking Yiwu City as a case. Land use data from 2006 and 2014 combined with multinomial logistic regression were applied to first detect the determinants of residential/commercial and industrial land conversion. Next, a cellular automata model was coded to forecast urban expansion with diverse land supply structures for residential/commercial and industrial land in 2020 by treating the regression results as conversion rules. We found that the determinants of residential/commercial and industrial land are distinguishable, and by considering such distinctions, we further found that Yiwu's urban expansion in 2020 will show diverse outcomes in the context of various land supply structures for residential/commercial and industrial land. More specifically, the more residential/commercial land that is supplied and the less industrial land that is supplied, the more clustered form of urban expansion will be, but the urban form variance is not very obvious. These findings inform a new dimension of decision-making for local government to manage urban growth both in China and in other regions.