Regional types and regulating strategy of changes for rural residential land in China

Abstract: The change of rural residential land dominates rural land use transformation. Understanding the dynamic change and spatial pattern and developing targeted macro regulating strategy accordingly can provide guidelines for promoting rural land consolidation, rural development and optimizing distribution pattern of towns and villages. In recent years, some studies use single index method especially the net change scale or net change rate, and many of them are on macro perspective. Such method is difficult to depict the complicated types of change for rural residential land. Based on the comprehensive perspective including km-grid, county and province level, this paper used grid data of rural residential land (1 km×1 km) and put forward a new research framework to analyze the quantitative characteristics and to classify the regional types of rural residential land change. The comprehensive indicator method consisted of total change rate, net change rate and share modifying. Then the spatial autocorrelation analysis method was used to explore the spatial distribution and agglomeration features. Based on the above analysis, regulating strategies for rural residential land were proposed finally. First, all provinces or counties nationwide were classified into four regional types by the comprehensive indicator method. The increased active regions included 786 counties and districts which mainly distributed in Huang-Huai-Hai plain, northeast plain, Yangtze River delta, Sichuan basin, etc. The increasing and decreasing balanced active regions consisted of 297 counties which was the least among the four types. The decreased active regions involved 352 counties and districts and mainly concentrated in mountain areas and the transition section between plain and mountain area. The final type was named as the changed slowly regions which had 926 counties and districts, accounting the most in the four types, and almost all of them distributed in the western China. Second, compared with single index method, the comprehensive indicator method was able to identify the special types of increasing and decreasing balanced active regions, and avoided the defect that the change rates of some counties might be overestimated or underestimated due to the regional difference of the original scale of rural residential land by share modifying. Therefore, the new method in this paper was more scientific for classifying change types. Third, the spatial autocorrelation analysis showed that the four types had significant space correlation. The high-high clusters mainly distributed in plains and areas around large cities, and the low-low clusters concentrated in those regions with poor natural and geographical conditions in central and southwest China and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Fourth, each change type should have targeted regulating strategy. The increasing active regions were the core areas for urbanization and rural-urban development transformation, in which the typical feature of rural residential land was rapidly increased. The key point of regulating strategy in those regions was the exited and revitalized mechanism innovation. The increasing and decreasing balanced active regions were the important areas with fertile arable land for protecting national food security. The regulation of rural residential land in those regions should pay attention to improving living conditions and environment for rural residents and promoting rural space reconstruction by land consolidation. The decreasing active regions were the main areas of rural residential land reclamation. The local governments should guide rural population for centralized residence with a moderate scale and should push forward the obsolete housing land reclamation to arable land or woodland. The changed slowly regions were in the most ecologically vulnerable and under developed rural area. Under the preconditions to strictly protect the ecological environment, these regions should combine land consolidation, rural development and village renovation, and then build typical eco-village.