Urban Land Carrying Capacity Evaluation of Wuhan City with Geographically Weighted Techniques

Objectives With the rapid urbanization in China, urban land resource has become a key part in urban development, and attracted more and more attentions. However, global methods were traditionally adopted for its carrying capacity evaluation and analysis, which largely ignored the spatial heterogeneities or non-stationarities in the data relationships.

Methods In this paper, we proposed a technical framework to evaluate and analyze the urban land carrying capacity with geographically weighted (GW) techniques from local perspective. We exemplified this framework with a case study in Wuhan City. In details, we adopted GW summary statistics, GW principal component analysis and GW regression to conduct the evaluation and analysis.

Results The comprehensive pressure of land carrying capacity shows a decaying trend from the city center to the outside areas, to which population density and floor area ratio contribute the most. Moreover, different factors present spatially varying influences on the comprehensive pressure of land carrying capacity.

Conclusions The proposed framework with GW techniques works well on evaluating and analyzing urban land carrying capacity from local perspective, and its evolution is still ongoing with more local techniques involved, which makes it be applicable in more cases and scenarios.