Urban sprawl : A case study of Shenzhen , China

Harvey and Clark,1965; Gans,1967; Jackson,1985; Mills and Hamilton, 1994) in Western countries, especially in the United States. With the development of urbanization, on the edge of cities, the conversion of land to urban use became more and more severe and was out of control, mainly due to population growth, rising house-hold incomes and transportation improvements (Mieszkowski and Mills,1993; Brueckner and Fansler,1983; McGrath, 2005). The common definition of urban sprawl was given by Ewing (1994), who defined it as a form of low density spatial development, always characterized by scattered and discontinuous leapfrog expansion, single and segregation land uses. Since the 1987 World commission on the Environment and Development and the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Congress on the sustainable Development, the awareness of environment has become more and more widespread in every walk of life. And in fact, from then on, urban sprawl has become a subject of particular interest among urban planners and policymakers all over the World (Frenkel and Ashkenazi, 2008). There is plentiful literature on the subject of urban sprawl or excessive urban expansion, and nowadays there is common agreement on the negative impact of urban sprawl on the environment, the economy, and the society. Brueckner(2000), for example, concludes that: