Evaluation on the Intensification for Rural Residdential Land in Haidian District of Beijing, China
北京市海淀区农村居民点集约利用评价

There is a growing concern on the conflict between increases in population and limitations in land in the context of accelerating industrialization and urbanization. The issue is more important in China because of its large population base and a rapid expansion of land for construction. Numerous studies on intensive utilization for land have been carried out in recent years, most of which focused on urban land for construction while relatively less attention was paid to rural residential land. The total area of rural residential land in China reached 1 470×104 ha according to the Ministry of Land and Resources P. R. C. (MLRC), i.e. 182m2 of rural housing land per farmer, greatly exceeding the national standard of 150m2 of rural residential land per farmer. Therefore, research on intensive utilization for rural residential land has become particularly important for China. The authors aimed to propose an index system and a method for evaluating the degree of intensive utilization for rural residential land. An index system was developed by using five indexes accounting for land use structure, sufficient degree, compact degree and area for rural residential land, respectively. Survey data from Beijing Municipal Rural Affair Committee were utilized to evaluate the land intensification for 72 rural residential areas in Haidian District in terms of the newly developed index system. It was concluded that: 1) rural residential land is often mixed with township enterprise land because of inappropriate planning for land utilization in villages. As such, the degree of intensification for rural residential land may have been underestimated when using an index of land area per farmer; 2) it was noted that both permanent resident population and floating population should be considered when calculating the rural residential land area per farmer in the context of increasing mobility of rural population; 3) for 72 rural residential areas in Haidian District, 23, 33 and 16 of the total were categorized as intensive degree, generally intensive degree and extensive degree in sequence, showing mean scores of the intensive utilization degree of 0.71, 0.61 and 0.43, respectively; 4) from the perspective of spatial distribution, the southern Haidian District showed a relatively larger mean score of 0.63 compared with that of 0.57 the northern part did. Among four towns of the northern Haidian District, Wenquan Town showed a larger score of 0.66 compared with the other three towns which showed minor differences between each other.