Urban growth boundaries of the Beijing Metropolitan Area: Comparison of simulation and artwork

Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) have been extensively studied and applied in the USA as an effective tool to curb urban sprawl. The People's Republic of China Town and Country Planning Act requires the establishment of urban construction boundaries (UCBs) in Chinese city master and detail plans. We consider planned UCBs in China to be Chinese UGBs, as they have similar implementation mechanisms to their counterparts in the USA. However, different from UGBs in the USA, Chinese UGBs often resemble artwork by urban designers. Accordingly, they lack sound analytical basis and fail to sufficiently accommodate market mechanisms of land use. When measured by the criterion that the UGB should result in a spatial pattern that corresponds to its map, the Chinese UGBs are not well implemented. In this paper, we propose a method to support establishing UGBs through constrained cellular automata (CA). Our approach takes into account influence factors related to urban growth and generates UGBs based on spatiotemporally dynamic simulations. This method is applied to establish UGBs for the central city, new cities and small towns in the Beijing Metropolitan Area. The results indicate that there are significant differences between the UGBs based on constrained CA simulations and those in the previously established city master plan. We argue that our method could be a helpful planning tool for the establishment of UGBs in Chinese cities. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.