A Quality Assessment of National Territory Use at the City Level: A Planning Review Perspective

With increasing urbanization, the populations in China’s cities are growing, and the cities themselves are gradually expanding. Competition for access to the national territory’s resources is also growing. Thus, the quality of national territory use is worsening. Quality assessments on national territory use can provide a basis for solving this issue. By combining the implications of new urbanization in China, we established an assessment index system relating to the quality of national territory use, from the perspective of harmoniously developing spaces for production, living and ecology. A subjective and objective integrated weighting method was developed based on principal component analysis and planning review. Then, a comprehensive discriminative model was established to assess the quality of national territory use. The evaluation results showed that harmonious development of spaces for production, living and ecology did not occur in either the ecology-oriented or production-oriented regions. The integrated quality of national territory use in the production-oriented region had a significant advantage over that of the ecology-oriented region. The integrated quality of national territory use was highest in Changzhou’s city center and vicinity. The results can support the implementation of China’s new urbanization strategy and provide evidence to improve the criteria for the intensive use of national territorial resources.