The Socio-economic and Biophysical Dimensions of Urbanization Strategies in Rural China: Land Use Changes, Human Time and Energy Intensity

This paper links development-induced urbanization strategies to changes in land use and associated impacts on rural communities and agro-ecosystems in a selected rural area of China. Energy, monetary and human time variables as well as information on environmental pressures, have been combined to obtain indicators that are useful to compare the metabolism of different patterns of land use from an integrated perspective. The results show that urbanization strategies, aimed at shifting the land use from traditional to monoculture methods and at displacing the local population, while increasing the economic efficiency is also associated with an increase in fossil energy consumption and environmental pressure, as well as a reduction of the multifunctional characteristic of the area under investigation.