Impacts of state-led and bottom-up urbanization on land use change in the peri-urban areas of Shanghai: Planned growth or uncontrolled sprawl?

During the last several decades since the opening reform, peri-urbanization emerged in the developed areas of China. In Shanghai, peri-urban areas expanded rapidly, and land use in these areas experienced significant changes and restructuring. This paper examines the expansion of peri-urban areas, and their social-economic characteristics in Shanghai from 1990 to 2009. By combining Landsat TM images and land use maps based on site survey, this paper analyzes the spatio-temporal characteristics of land use change in the peri-urban areas of Shanghai, and we find that expansion of non-agricultural land has been mainly characterized by the growth of industrial land, and has caused significant loss of cultivated and forested land. This paper then examines the driving forces of land use change from the perspectives of state-led growth and bottom-up development. It argues that state-led growth has played a dominant role in the expansion of non-agricultural land, and the impact of bottom-up development has been much less significant. Planning has played a critical role in regulating the space to accommodate the increasing demand of population and economic growth while at the same time promoting space growth to attract outside investment.