A GIS-based Green Infrastructure Planning for Sustainable Urban Land Use and Spatial Development

Green infrastructure has been a popular framework for smart development and conservation planning. If it is proactively planned, developed, and maintained in a systematical way, it also should be a better model for land use and spatial development in a city. By integrating a GIS-based ecological connectivity assessment with the patch-corridor-matrix model, this study provided a green infrastructure planning approach to guide the sustainable land use decision in the Longgang District of Shenzhen in China. The method has an effective performance in identifying the vital ecological areas and linkages prior to development in suburban areas, and also the key sites for protection and restoration in developed sites. It is hoped that based on this planned green infrastructure frame, the land resource units could be developed or protected when most needed and most suitable in the future.