Article

Journal of Planning Literature

2020, Vol. 35(1) 25-40
ª The Author(s) 2019
Curbing Sprawl with Development-limiting Article reuse guidelines:
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Boundaries in Urban China: A Review DOI: 10.1177/0885412219874145
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of Literature
Yizhao Yang1, Lei Zhang2 , Yumin Ye2 and Zhifang Wang3

Abstract
Facing the need to control urban sprawl, many Chinese cities are exploring the use of development-limiting boundaries, such as
urban growth boundary (UGB) and urban development boundary (UDB), as required by the central government. Through a key
word search of several databases including Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure, we identified and
reviewed hundreds of articles published in academic or professional journals. Our review shows that policy processes discussed
in the literature have emphasized the technical aspect with analytical sophistication. We identified three types of approach to
UGB and UDB in the literature: the growth-driven, the constraint-oriented, and the hybrid. While urban theories and modeling
techniques that originated from Western countries have greatly influenced the analytical process underlying some of these
approaches, the UGB/UDB policy debate and explorations were also responsive to China’s unique urban and policy conditions.
Despite the rich empirical content in the literature, very little research has been grounded in a scientific understanding of
China’s urban development. Issues such as intergovernmental coordination, policy enforcement, and evaluation were also
inadequately addressed in the existing literature. The literature’s newness may have been a major factor for these limitations.
Our critique of the current literature may inspire new areas of research to generate knowledge that can inform China’s
continuous policy efforts to combat urban sprawl.

Keywords
planning practice, urban growth boundary, growth management, China

Introduction studies perspective. We are particularly interested in examining

China’s rapid urban expansion in the past two decades has
exhibited patterns characteristic of urban sprawl with signifi-
cant environmental costs. Among the many strategies explored
by Chinese governments to guide urban development and fight
sprawl is the use of development-limiting boundaries to contain
urban expansion. These lines or boundaries take various names
in local planning, such as urban growth boundaries (UGBs),
urban development boundaries (UDBs), or urban construction
boundaries (UCBs). Like their counterparts employed in devel-
oped countries, such as the United States and Australia, these
policy tools’ theoretical justifications, proper implementation
methods, and ultimate effectiveness are still at the center of
debate among scholars, practitioners, and policy makers.
In this article, we review current literature on the use of
these development-limiting lines/boundaries in urban China.
The literature covered in this review includes scholarship writ-
ten in Chinese or English identified from extensive searches of
academic journal databases as well as gray literature (e.g.,
government reports, technique papers) found through online
search engines (e.g., Google and Baidu). This review aims to
follow the intellectual progression and assess the importance
and comprehensiveness of existing literature from a policy
the utility of current literature to inform policy processes in
relation to China’s desire to base policy on science and its goals
underlying the pursuit of a new kind of urban growth that
balances economic development and environmental protection.
The research has discovered an emerging body of literature
that explicitly tackles these development-limiting boundaries.
Our review suggests that, while the literature addresses various
goals connected to the central government’s policy initiative,
there is a tendency to rely on a technical approach to achieving
those goals. The policy process discussed in the literature has
1
Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management, University of
Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
2
Department of Urban Planning and Management, School of Public
Administration and Public Policy, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
3
College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Peking University,
Beijing, China
Corresponding Author:
Lei Zhang, Department of Urban Planning and Management, School of Public
Administration and Public Policy, Renmin University of China, Building Qiushi
430, No. 59, Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100872, China.
Emails: leizhang1976@ruc.edu.cn; thirstone1976@vip.sina.com
26
emphasized the technical aspect with analytical sophistication.
We identified three types of approach to UGB and UDB in the
literature: the growth-driven, the constraint-oriented, and the
hybrid. While urban theories and urban modeling techniques
that originated from Western countries greatly influenced the
analytical process underlying some of these approaches, the
UGB/UDB policy debate and explorations were also respon-
sive to China’s unique urban and policy conditions, which is
manifested in the adoption of a bottom-line approach to bound-
ary delineation and discussions about strategies to use UGBs/
UDBs as a unifying apparatus to integrate existing spatial con-
trols. Despite the rich empirical content in the literature, very
little research has been grounded in a scientific understanding
of China’s urban development. Issues such as intergovernmen-
tal coordination, policy enforcement, and evaluation were also
inadequately addressed in the existing literature. The litera-
ture’s newness may have been a major factor for these
limitations.
This article is organized in six parts. Following the Intro-
duction, we provide a description of the context of these spatial
strategies in China and the governance systems in which these
policy tools have been put into experimentation. Such contex-
tual understanding helps define the scope of this literature
review as well as our research objectives and is described in
the section proceeding Method. After presenting the findings,
we conclude this article with a critique of the current literature
and suggestions for future research.
Research Background
The urgency to adopt spatially explicit planning strategies for
China’s urban management arose from the growing fear that
environmental changes induced by urban development will
lead to the country’s natural resource depletion and ecosystem
collapse (Qian, Finamore, and Chan 2007; Yang, Yin, and Ying
2013). While many Chinese cities need continuous urban
development to help realize the nation’s socioeconomic goals
and maintain social and economic stability, the central govern-
ment has made it clear in a series of high-profile urban work
conferences and associated official documents that China can
no longer afford to sacrifice its environment for economic
gains, and it is essential to national security to protect areas
of significant ecological value (Ma 2005).
Despite the substantial legal and policy progress China has
made in its environmental management system in the past two
decades (Güneralp, Perlstein, and Seto 2015), environment-
oriented legislation, policies, and strategies put forward at the
national level have often been poorly enforced at the city level,
where short-term economic and political benefits afforded by
urban development often drive local governments’ land use
decisions (Ma 2005; Zhu and Tang 2018). Methods employed
to control land consumption in a bid to slow the trend of
excessive urban expansion have not been effective. Analyses
of satellite data show that China’s developed area expanded by
78.3 percent from 1990 to 2000 and again by 85.5 percent from
2000 to 2010, compared with 28 percent and 67 percent of
Journal of Planning Literature 35(1)
urban population growth for the same periods, respectively
(Wang et al. 2012). In this section, we discuss the issues under-
lying the ineffectiveness of existing spatial controls of urban
development and describe the fragmented institutional context
against which the central government’s UDB initiative was
launched.
Before we delve into the governance of urban land devel-
opment in China, it is worth noting that China has a long
history of applying various kinds of policy tools to manage
and control urbanization quantity and speed in pursuit of its
national social, economic, and political goals. These include
population policy (e.g., the residential registration, hukou, sys-
tem) to control urban population growth, infrastructure and
industrial investment policy to balance urbanization distribu-
tion, economic policies to stimulate market-based urban devel-
opment, and land policy to prioritize national goals via urban
land governance. More recently, the central government has
begun to pay more attention to the quality of urbanization by
emphasizing the need to have people-oriented urbanization and
urbanization that promotes ecological civilization, which led to
the use of new tools such as “green GDP” as a performance
measure to incentivize city leaders to adopt a more balanced
urbanization approach. The development-limiting lines in the
form of UGBs or UDBs are among the new policy devices
considered by the central government to address the issue of
urbanization quality. In this literature review study, we focus
our attention on these promising yet understudied spatial plan-
ning tools aimed at controlling overall urban development
patterns.
China’s land development process is managed by a top-
down and command–control governance regime consisting of
multiple systems of bureaucracies: the economic and social
development planning system, the land use planning system,
and the urban–rural planning system. Each of the systems uses
a hierarchy of plans to manage urban growth and development
where a national plan controls or guides plans made by lower
level governments. For example, the latest National General
Land Use Plan (2006–2020) strictly governs land use plans
developed at provincial, municipal/prefecture, country/district,
and village/town levels. These plans are instruments for the
central government to incorporate national interests into local
land use decisions, which has evolved from being exclusively
economic driven to a more balanced consideration of eco-
nomic, environmental, and social issues (China Daily, 2017).
Similarly, in the urban planning system, there is a national
urban system plan and a hierarchy of Urban Master Plans. The
third planning system uses a hierarchy of Economic and Social
Development Plans (ESDPs) to define social and economic
development goals and environmental protection targets in the
form of quantitative indexes and benchmarks for each level of
government.1 Consistency requirements defined by laws state
that the Urban Master Plan must be in agreement with the
Master land use plan, and both the land use plan and Urban
Master Plan should be consistent with the ESDP at the same
government level. However, no mechanism exists to ensure the
Yang et al.
consistency and conformance of these plans (Cheng et al.
2015; Zhou and Lu et al. 2017).
These plans and relevant policies have historically empha-
sized quantitative controls of land development and used
indexes, quotas, and benchmarks as tools to manage growth
(see Table 1). As the primary instrument for managing China’s
planned economy, the ESDP system contains numerical targets
and measures guiding various aspects of the country’s devel-
opment, including the ones closely connected with urban
growth: urbanization rate, basic farmland area size, urban con-
struction area size, and so on. The land use planning system
started using a quota scheme in 1987 to control annual land
supply for urban development at different government levels
and to ensure basic farmland is preserved at a quantity needed
for maintaining China’s food security.2 Urban Master Plans
specify the amount of land needed for urban development
based on projected population and economic growth. While a
land use plan and an urban plan for a municipality or prefecture
city often contain land use maps designating areas zoned for
urban construction, no explicit boundaries are delineated in
those plans to specifically contain the urban expansion prior
to 2013 (Han et al. 2009). Some scholars consider the identifi-
able boundary lines containing all urban construction land,
known as the urban construction boundary (UCB), as the de
facto UGBs or UDBs in China prior to the official endorsement
of such terms (see Long et al. 2013; Han et al. 2009). But there
was no deliberate effort or requirement to maintain the shape of
UCBs in either land use plans or Urban Master Plans, since the
urban construction land areas were often determined and des-
ignated to meet quota requirements. In fact, UCBs’ physical
forms were often driven by planners’ artistic/aesthetic prefer-
ences rather than an objective and scientific analysis of devel-
opment trends (Long et al. 2013).
The local government can use various ways to rearrange the
urban construction land spatially without changing the total
amount of land area, including transfer of development rights
between land parcels inside and outside the UCBs and even
between cities and conversion of rural construction land back
to farmland to allow additional farmland conversion to urban
use at the city or UCB’s edge. Thus, it is not surprising that
empirical analyses have shown that the urban construction land
designation approach was ineffective at controlling the spatial
scope of urban development (Han et al. 2009; Lai and Han
2014), although some evidence exists suggesting that it had
somewhat positive effects at controlling the overall quantity
of land development (Zhou and Huang et al. 2017).
Over the past two decades, the central government has
started adding or strengthening spatial guidance and controls
in all three planning systems, but inadequate spatial resolution,
vague definitions, and lack of a mechanism to unify these tools
have become barriers to their effective implementation, espe-
cially at the city level. For example, a spatial framework sup-
porting the implementation of a National ESDP (aka the
National Five Year Plan [FYP]) was proposed in 2005, and the
resultant National Major Function Area Zoning was adopted in
2011 for the Twelfth FYP. This plan identifies and delineates at
27
the national scale four primary function zones: (1) an optimiza-
tion zone, (2) a key development zone, (3) a development
restriction zone, and (4) a development-prohibited zone—
based on a “scientific index system” that consists of three kinds
of indicators: the carrying capacity of resources and environ-
ment, current development intensity, and future development
potential (Fan et al. 2012). The zones provide a spatial basis to
differentiate policies in a wide range of aspects including gov-
ernment investment, land use, environmental protection, and so
on. For example, only cities within the “key development
zone” can serve as national foci of future economic develop-
ment if their environmental and resource capacities are consid-
ered adequate. Currently, a process is underway to create
provincial-level functional plans based on the national plan.
While the boundaries are explicitly demarcated on those zoning
maps, the spatial resolution is often too low to allow for effec-
tive enforcement at a municipal or city level.
The land use planning system began to use a similar zonal
approach to strengthening spatial control in 2009 by devising
four spatial zones in a city’s land use plan based on develop-
ment suitability: the permitted construction zone (developed
area), conditionally permitted construction zone, restricted con-
struction zone, and the prohibited zone (Li et al. 2017). Starting
in 2008, a city’s urban plan needed to include three zones
designated on the basis of land use types: prohibited construc-
tion zone, restricted construction zone, and suitable construc-
tion zone, in addition to developed/constructed zone. However,
these new spatial concepts and their implementation were nei-
ther clearly defined within each of the governance systems nor
well-coordinated between them (Zhang et al. 2014). A number
of problems exist, including inconsistent land use classification
schemes used by both planning systems, vagueness in defining
the correspondence between land use classification and devel-
opment suitability, lack of a mechanism to ensure policy con-
sistency vertically and horizontally across various plans, and so
on (Zhou and Lu et al. 2017). Table 1 summarizes the quantity
and spatial controls adopted in the three planning systems and
implemented at various government levels.
Besides the delineated zones, a number of controls with
spatial consequences have also been integrated into the urban
planning system for various purposes since the early 2000s.
For example, green lines are delineated in an urban plan to
protect green space, blue lines to protect water resources, pur-
ple lines indicate historic preservation districts, and yellow
lines demarcate areas reserved for basic urban infrastructure
and facilities. These spatial elements in urban plans generally
do not aim to control the overall development patterns. In
addition to the spatial control instruments promulgated through
these planning bureaucracies, many other government agencies
put forward spatial controls that can affect urban development
(e.g., noise control, scenic area protection, flood control).
Long, Shen, and Mao (2011) conducted an analysis of the
Beijing metro area and discovered sixty kinds of concurrent
spatial controls based on eighteen laws, eighty-three state and
local regulations, and six international conventions.
28 Journal of Planning Literature 35(1)

Table 1. Planning Systems Managing Urban Development in China.

Planning Systems Governing Urban Development

Institutional Components Economic and Social Planning Land Use Planning Urban–Rural Planning

Bureaucracies Policy-making National Development and Ministry of Land and Resources Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural
in charge Reform commission Development
Implementation Department of development Department/Bureau of land use Department/Bureau of urban and
planning planning rural planning
System of plans Economic and Social Land Use Master Plans (plus Detailed Urban Master Plans (plus Detailed
Development Plans plans) plans)
Implementation levels National, province, municipal/
National, province, municipal/ National, province, municipal/
prefecture city prefecture city, county, township prefecture city
Relevant Instrument/tools Measures and targets for Yearly quotas for the following: farm Urban population size, index for
quantity basic farmland area, urban land, basic farmland, urban and different land uses, control of
controls construction land area, rural construction land, farmland development characteristics and
urbanization rate, to urban land conversion, standards (e.g., streets, public
forestation rate, and so on farmland supplement through land buildings, public space)
reclamation, per capita urban
industrial and mining land, urban
construction land, urban industrial
and mining land, construction land
growth, and land conversion from
agricultural use to urban use
Implementation National, province, municipal/ National, province, municipal/ Municipal/prefecture city (county,
levels prefecture city prefecture city, county, township township)
Spatial Instrument/tools Main function area zoning Land use zoning, zones permitted for Urban land use zoning, zones based
controls different levels of urban on overall development suitability,
construction, redline area for green lines for green space, blue
basic farmland lines for water resources, purple
lines for historic preservation
districts, and yellow lines for basic
urban infrastructure and facilities
Implementation National, province Municipal, prefecture cities, county, Municipal, prefecture cities (county,
levels township township)

While most of these spatial controls have seen weak enforce-
ment, one type has received wider recognition. The national
ecological redline policies mandated by the 2014 Environment
Protection Law are being implemented by the environmental
protection agencies at various jurisdictional levels. Under the
“redline” policies, boundaries of significant valuable and vulner-
able ecological lands are mapped out using the “hotspot” method
to ensure its spatial precision (Yang et al. 2016). This approach
has been applied to the protection of basic farmland, habitat for
endangered species, critical wetland, and forestland (Bai et al.
2016). These redline boundaries have the strongest legal status
compared to other spatial control tools, but their effectiveness is
undermined by the fact that not all redline areas are adequately
integrated into policies directly guiding urban development. Cur-
rently, only basic farmland’s redline boundaries have been pre-
cisely delineated and integrated into local land use plans at all
government levels (down to the village or town level).
Institutional fragmentation and lack of a mechanism and
willingness for intergovernmental collaboration is a major
obstacle to policy effectiveness. The three planning systems
directly managing land development are overseen by separate
and independent departments: Development and Reform
Commissions at various jurisdiction levels govern the eco-
nomic and social development planning system, the Ministry
of Land and Resources (MLR) at the central level and land use
planning bureaus at local levels are in charge of the land use
planning system, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural
Development (MHURD) at the central level and urban plan-
ning bureaus at local level manage the urban planning system.3
The lack of coordination between these latter two governance
systems has been a long-standing problem, given their diver-
ging goals and approaches to urban development. The land use
planning system bases policy decisions on concerns over land
supply and constraints, whereas the urban planning system
aims to accommodate land demand arising from local govern-
ments’ development ambitions. Conflicts and inconsistencies
are common between urban plans and land use plans, causing
confusions and loopholes in the land use decision process.
These problems are further aggravated by the fact that many
government agencies are often unwilling to share information
and infrastructure for information management is inadequate
(Long, Shen, and Mao 2011).
As a new initiative by the central government to strengthen
the spatial controls in urban development, UGBs or UDBs are
Yang et al.
still at an early stage in policy implementation. While academic
interest in these concepts started in the late 1990s and a few cities
had experimented with similar policies at their own discretion,
the emergence of UDB as a national policy can be traced to the
2013 Central Urbanization Work Conference, where national
leaders proposed that UDB should be used to confine urban
development into a clearly defined, geographically connected
region. In the following year, MLR and MHURD identified four-
teen pilot cities to explore UGB or UDB implementation.4 With-
out a national standard issued from the central government
stipulating the process and format of the UDB policy, local
experiments moved fast and adopted a wide range of trial-and-
error approaches (Lin, Qiao, and Ye 2017).
It is within this context that we examine the current litera-
ture on these spatial planning instruments and assess how intel-
lectual inquiries of some of these issues can help inform
relevant policy processes. How should these instruments be
clearly defined in policy and spatial terms? How to integrate
the UDBs with other spatial management tools? How can pol-
icy implementation be adequately monitored and properly eval-
uated? These are the questions in need of answers based on
thorough analyses of cases and intellectual discourse. Addition-
ally, one of the problems that has weakened the effectiveness of
existing spatial tools is the institutional fragmentation in Chi-
na’s urban development management. Regarding this issue, the
central government’s UDB initiative also included a call for
“Integration of Multi-Planning” of ESDP, urban and rural plan-
ning, and land use planning both at the city and county level.
Such institutional reform is a huge task, and its connection with
UDB brings additional complexities, as well as opportunities,
in the UDB policy’s execution. The UDB itself depends on an
integrative planning approach to become effective; its imple-
mentation process plays a role in coordinating and unifying the
separate planning institutions. We are also interested in whether
existing UDB-focused research can help inform the processes
in this respect.
Research Scope and Objectives
We conduct this literature review research from a policy studies
perspective (see Nagel and MacRae 1980). We focus on liter-
ature specifically addressing UGBs or UDBs in China. Our
analyses draw from writings dealing with the nature, causes,
and effects of these policy tools and evaluate the extent to
which policy-related ideas and suggestions presented in the
literature are based on an awareness of the causes behind the
policy problem (in this case, urban sprawl) and an understand-
ing of the structures and process affecting the effectiveness of
policy implementation. This research has the following
objectives:
1. Develop a precise definition of these terms and identify
distinctions and connections among them. We provide a
review of the policy emergence and a summary of the
goals and objectives associated with the planning
instruments.
29
2. Survey current approaches by which these spatial stra-
tegies are explored in the literature. We examine how
ideas and debates presented in the literature respond to
international influences and to domestic and local con-
ditions. We are particularly interested in assessing
whether proposition of a certain approach and explora-
tion of alternatives are articulated in the literature to
address issues with scientific basis, technical compe-
tency, and political process.
3. Identify evidence presented in the literature to assess
the effectiveness of these policy tools in achieving their
stated goals and whether there are some unintended
consequences associated with these spatial policies.
Method
We conducted a search in both English and Chinese literature.
The primary targets were peer-reviewed academic writings that
are analytical in nature and offer debate on the pros and cons of
the policies themselves and their implementation, present var-
ious approaches to policy formulation and implementation, and
discuss solutions to the challenges presented in the governance
systems to the effectiveness of policy outcome. We also used
descriptive writings from news reports, magazine articles, and
government circulars presenting facts and accounts relevant to
the policy’s definitions, goals, time line of major events
recounting its evolution as well as its formulation and imple-
mentation process. This second type of literature helps contex-
tualize our analyses and helps us assess the academic
literature’s adequacy from a policy studies perspective.5
We conducted independent searches for English literature
using the following databases: Web of Science, ProQuest
Social Science, ProQuest Social Science Premium Collection,
JSTOR, and Google Scholar. The search for Chinese literature
primarily relied on the China Academic Journals’ full-text
database China National Knowledge Infrastructure. An addi-
tional search for government reports was performed using the
Baidu Scholar search engine. The Web of Science Core Col-
lection was the main database we used to search for English
academic journal articles, together with other databases that
supplement with records from magazines, theses/dissertations,
and reports. The literature search utilized a number of terms
derived from the diverse terminology used to refer to the pol-
icies in English and/or possible translations from Chinese lit-
erature. The following terms, coupled with the Boolean
operation “AND ‘China’” to ensure the search outcome’s geo-
graphic relevance, were used to find records containing them in
the abstract, title, and/or keywords fields. The search of Chi-
nese literature was based on similar key words in Chinese:
 Urban development boundary (boundaries)
 Urban construction boundary
 Urban growth boundary (boundaries)
We screened the initial results from the term-based searches by
language, document types, and publication time. We then
30
reviewed titles and abstracts to select a subset deemed to help us
answer the research questions and achieve our research objectives.
Each of the articles in the final set of literature was read by at least
two researchers to compare reading notes and understanding.
Findings
Literature Search Outcome
In total, we identified 27 peer-reviewed English articles published
in academic journals via multiple searches. Overall, the academic
literature in English on these spatial planning instruments is rela-
tively new and shows a growing trajectory in volume. The litera-
ture spans the last decade since 2007, and 18 of the 27 articles have
been published since 2016. These articles come from a variety of
academic journals. The journal Sustainability has published the
most articles (6), followed by Habitat International (4). The Chi-
nese literature has a greater volume and longer history on these
topics; 266 articles have been published in Chinese academic/
professional journals since 1997 when the concept of UGBs was
introduced (see Li 1997). There has been a rapid increase in Chi-
nese articles on UGBs and UDBs since 2013, the year when the
central government issued the call for implementing UDBs in
urban planning with 203 articles being published since then. Com-
pared with the English literature, their Chinese counterparts have
been published in professional journals in urban planning and
academic journals in the field of geographic research. By early
2018, a total of 42 articles have been published in the Chinese
Journal Planner, 12 in City Planning Review, and 10 in Urban
Planning Forum (see Table 2).
The nonacademic literature we included in our review
mainly comes from news reports, magazines, and government
reports. The value of examining this type of literature lies in
obtaining information and knowledge about the time line and
institutional contexts of these spatial management tools’ devel-
opment. Close to a hundred records were found via ProQuest
and Google search. These articles and reports come from out-
lets, such as China Perspectives, China Review, and AMBIO.
Additionally, we used Baidu to search official web pages and
documents reporting on the governments’ major announce-
ments, statements, as well as guidelines pertaining to UDB
definition and implementation.
Analysis of Literature Content
We categorized the academic literature generally into three
types based on an article’s main content:
1. institutional analyses of the structure and mechanism of
bureaucratic operations supporting the UDB policy
process,
2. discussions and debate exploring methods and proce-
dures to enable or facilitate the UDB policy implemen-
tation, and
3. policy performance that evaluates the impacts and
effectiveness of UDB cases.
Journal of Planning Literature 35(1)
The fourth type of literature that appears only in Chinese
and is aimed at introducing concepts, international experiences,
and case studies includes twenty-three articles, among which
the practices of Portland, Oregon, appeared as the most fre-
quently studied case (seven articles).
Most English literature pertains to policy implementation
(category 2) with this category being dominated (greater than
80 percent) by articles presenting technical methodologies of
policy formulation (e.g., boundary line delineation methodol-
ogy). Close to 30 percent of the English literature focuses on
the institutional background of targeted spatial instruments and
argues for organizational reform to overcome barriers in policy
processes, although very few articles address specific mechan-
isms for institutional change. Given the newness of these spa-
tial tools, it is not surprising that very few articles address
policy performance. Of the 49 articles we reviewed, only three
articles discuss policy effectiveness. Similarly, the Chinese lit-
erature also lacks policy evaluation research. But the distribu-
tion of the first two categories is more even; 137 articles focus
on discussion of policy processes and institutional support and
91 articles explore methods of boundary delineation, often-
times with specific case studies.
Policy Definition and Objectives
Across the 27 academic articles published in English focusing
on UGBs or UDBs, multiple terms, such as “urban growth
boundaries,” “urban development boundaries,” “urban con-
struction boundaries,” or even “urban sprawl boundaries,” are
used to refer to the development-limiting lines wherein urban
development is to be contained. The Chinese literature pub-
lished in early 2000s frequently used the term “urban growth
boundaries,” while most literature published since 2013
adopted the term “urban development boundaries” (126 of
203) as the concept was promoted in the official government
guidelines. Our review of the literature shows that the fre-
quency change in the use of these terms was not just influenced
by the central government; it in fact reflected an evolving
understanding of urban containment approaches suitable to
China as the distinctions between the two terms were articu-
lated in the discourse. After the initial screening and review of
all articles’ abstracts, we conducted an in-depth reading of all
27 English articles and 50 Chinese articles. The literature con-
tent summarized below is based on the thoroughly reviewed
publications.
Much of the early Chinese literature’s discussions about
UGBs focused on the experiences of Oregon, United States.
Portland metro’s UGB was a particularly popular case used in
introducing the concept to Chinese literature in the late 1990s.
The definition and understanding of this term presented in the
early Chinese literature suggests an obvious Western influence.
The UGB concept took on a meaning that emphasizes a bound-
ary aimed at spatially containing projected and forecasted
urban growth estimated for a targeted time (usually for the next
fifteen to twenty years) and also a boundary that is expandable
as time goes on. The understanding of UGB later grew to
Yang et al. 31

Table 2. Summary of Literature by Journal Name and Year.

English Literature Number of Publication

2007 2009 2011 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Total

Total 1 1 1 2 1 3 5 10 3 27
Journal Name
Sustainability 2 3 1 6
Habitat International 1 2 1 4
Cities 1 1 2
Computers Environment and Urban Systems 1 1 2
International Journal of Geographical Information Science 1 1 2
Journal of Urban Planning and Development 1 1 2
Annals of the American Association of Geographers 1 1
Ecological Indicators 1 1
Ecology and Society 1 1
Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering 1 1
Journal of Environmental Management 1 1
Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy 1 1
Journal of Zhejiang University Science A 1 1
Landscape and Urban Planning 1 1
Open House International 1 1

Chinese Literature Number of Publication

1997 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Total

Total 1 2 3 2 8 12 6 11 18 13 28 40 47 52 23 266

Journal with at least five articles

规划师 Planners 1 4 1 2 7 2 2 4 12 6 1 42
城市规划 City Planning Review 1 1 1 2 1 1 5 12
城市发展 Urban Development 1 1 1 1 3 2 1 10
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include the recognition that UGB is about not only maintaining
the size and shape of the development area but also ensuring
the improvement in spatial structure and relationship among
various urban land uses (Zhang et al. 2014).
In the literature since the late 2000s, the definition of UDB
and related research has shown an effort to adopt this tool in
such a way that best meets China’s urgent needs to address
environmental issues. That is, urban development should be
rigidly controlled to safeguard a region’s ecological security;
UDBs should serve as a bottom line against urban expansion,
so that necessary regional resources and ecological environ-
ment are maintained to support the maximum level of urbani-
zation in a region (Lin et al. 2017). Zhuang et al. (2017, 8)
cited an official definition of UDBs from the Measures for
Formulating City Planning published by MUHRD (2016),
which states UDBs are spatial boundaries “based on the deter-
mination of factors such as topography, natural ecology, envi-
ronmental capacity and basic farmland” and “areas allowing
and banning urban development construction can be estab-
lished, permitting the largest possible boundaries for urban
construction land use.”
In more recent literature, the definition or explanation of
UDB emphasized the balance between demand-driven or
supply-driven approaches and has become characterized as
being “flexible enough to satisfy urban development needs but
rigid enough to restrict urban expansion in accordance with the
32
comprehensive carrying capacity of the region” (Jiang et al.
2016, 1322). It tends to encompass a more comprehensive list
of objectives in addition to containing urban expansion, includ-
ing (1) making the UDBs a unifying instrument that integrates
all existing spatial control lines, (2) compelling and facilitating
coordination among various government bureaucracies, (3)
requiring cities to improve the efficiency and spatial structure
of land uses, and (4) balancing the energy, economic, environ-
mental, and social impacts of urban development (Zhang et al.
2014).
Internationally, the use of development-limiting boundaries
to contain urban expansion widely exists in many countries.
These boundaries can take a concrete physical shape such as a
deliberately created greenbelt around a city in Britain, or they
can be formed as policy lines or restrictions in planning doc-
uments, such as the case of Portland metro UGB in the State of
Oregon, United States. Whether those boundaries have
emerged from a local jurisdiction’s own initiative or as an
outcome of a higher-level government’s mandate, protecting
open space and resource lands has always been a primary
objective for the boundaries’ formulation and implementation.
Additional objectives, such as improving efficient use of land,
guiding strategic investment of urban infrastructure, and pro-
moting compact urban form, are also closely connected to
those boundaries (Abbott, Howe, and Adler 1994). Our litera-
ture review shows China’s UGBs have evolved to embrace all
of the aforementioned objectives mostly because the central
government is eager to emulate the effectiveness of UGB prac-
tices in other countries.
What makes China’s UGBs unique is the goal of using
UGBs to delineate the maximum urbanization limit, which
based on our research has not been explicitly connected with
UGB practices in other countries where the UGBs typically
allow for continuous although staged urban expansions. The
inclusion of this specific goal reflects the Chinese central gov-
ernment’s determination to address the perceived existential
threat from uncontrolled or poorly controlled urbanization. The
policy practicality also arises from the fact that Chinese cities
engaged in UGB experimentations are prefecture or regional
cities with a fixed jurisdiction boundary, and a prefecture city
often oversees counties, county-level cities, and townships
located inside its boundary. Unlike American cities with their
ability to expand their administrative boundaries by annexing
in land parcels, while also being independent from each other, a
prefecture city in China is in a better position to apply a
regional approach to control urban expansion, to enforce inter-
governmental coordination, and to strategically phase urban
area expansion as the city-region’s urbanization reaches its
maximum limit indicated by its UGBs.
Debate on Policy Implementations: Challenges and
Solutions
The vast majority of the literature identified and reviewed in
this research focuses on the mechanical aspect of the spatial
policy’s implementation. More than 70 percent of the literature
Journal of Planning Literature 35(1)
we reviewed introduces and discusses various methods to
delineate UDBs and then applies the prescribed methods to a
city. UDB delineation methodology is affected by the defini-
tion of UDB adopted in an article; thus, the literature can also
be generally divided into three types:
1. The growth-driven approach typically follows three
steps: estimating future land demand, allocating the
demand spatially, and then delineating the UDB.
2. The constraint-oriented approach uses suitability analy-
ses to identify and delineate critical ecological areas so
as to protect them from urban development.
3. The hybrid approach takes both demand and constraints
into consideration. The discussions about boundary
delineation methods presented in the literature exhibit
intellectual progression similar to the definitions
adopted in the literature for the spatial control tools.
Table 3 summarizes the methodological content presented in
the literature based on the three approaches.
The growth-driven approach to boundary delineation typi-
cally adopts a methodology of predicting or simulating future
urban development patterns based on extrapolation of historical
trends. This method relies on spatial data (geographic informa-
tion system, remote sensing), uses cellular automata (CA)-
based technique to model the urban development process, and
analyzes historical trends in land use/cover changes to deter-
mine the impacts of a number of predetermined driving factors
on urban development. Such information is then used to predict
urban development at a future point in time (typically year
2020 or 2030) assuming current urban trends continue. The
spatial distribution of the simulated urban development is then
used to help delineate UGBs or UDBs, which involves edge
editing to filter out small, dispersed areas in order to form one
or more enclosed, continuous polygon boundaries.
The assumption of the growth-driven approach is that
growth can be accurately estimated and its spatial allocation
can be precisely predicted. The confidence in this approach
rests upon the capacity to fully understand urban development
processes and the hypothesis that no major disruptive forces
alter these processes. All technical articles presenting the simu-
lation methods relied on urban theories originating from
market-driven societies without questioning their applicability
to urban China. Many conditions, such as proximity to trans-
port infrastructure and central city location, are considered
extremely important enabling factors for urban development
in market-based economies. But the transport-induced urban
development dynamics may not be so apparent in China as
urban changes are more subject to policy and political changes
(Yeh and Li 2003; Long et al. 2013). Yet, these factors are
often ignored in the technical literature. Acknowledging the
lack of scientific understanding of China’s urban development
process, some authors suggested that the simulation techniques
are better used to compare different policy scenarios’ impacts
on development patterns, as opposed to delineating accurate
Yang et al. 33

Table 3. Summary of Urban Development Boundary (UDB)/Urban Growth Boundary Delineation Approaches Presented in Literature.

Types of Approach

Main Points Growth-driven Constraint-oriented Hybrid

Spatial scope of Past urban development areas, potential Entire city/region Past urban development areas,
analysis areas for future urban expansion potential areas for future urban
expansion city/region
Major factors • Physical conditions: slope, elevation, land • Physical conditions: topography, • Physical conditions: slope, land
considered to use/cover, and so on. land use/cover, and so on use/cover, and so on
affect urban • Locational conditions: proximity to urban • Landscape and resources: water, • Locational conditions: proximity
development centroids, commercial centers, forest, farmland (of different quality to urban centroids, commercial
transportation infrastructure, urban built- levels), disaster-prone areas, centers, transportation
up, and so on habitats, wetlands, and so on infrastructure, urban built-up,
• Locational conditions: proximity and so on
to stressors, proximity to built-up • Restriction factors: basic
areas farmland areas, carrying
• Policy conditions: redline policy capacity, redline policy areas
areas, protected areas
Frequently used Urban modeling and simulation techniques: Weight of evidence for suitability Combination of CA model (e.g.,
analytical cellular automata (CA), SLEUTH model, analysis, minimum cumulative SLEUTH) with carrying capacity
techniques future land use simulation model, agent- resistance model, carrying capacity analysis, suitability analysis (e.g.,
based model, CLUE-S model analysis, ecological sensitivity InVEST model), and so on
analysis
Boundary • Allocate projected future urban growth • Identify areas where absolute • Simulation methods to create
delineation via development simulation to create natural or policy restrictions exist boundaries followed by edge
methods development boundaries • Determine areas where urban treatment
• Use digital morphological edge treatment development is likely based on the • Overlay of areas identified as
methods to filter out dispersed small presence of relatively low level of redline areas or low capacity
patches to form an enclosed boundary constraints areas for exclusion
• Establish flexible UDB
(simulation-based) and rigid
UDB (constrain-based)
Integration with Consideration of other spatial policies is Redline policies considered as one of Redline polices considered, other
other spatial limited major factors determining UDB spatial control tools combined
policies with UDB
Representative Liang et al. (2018); Long, Han, and Mao Liu and Liang et al. (2017); Wang et al. He et al. (2018); Jiang et al. (2016);
studies (2009); Long et al. (2013); Tian and Qiao (2012); Wang et al. (2013); Yang; Liu and Zhang et al. (2017); B.
(2014); Xi et al. (2009); Shi et al. (2017); Zhou, and Qian (2010); Zheng and Zheng et al. (2018); Q. Zheng
Zhou et al. (2016) LV (2016); Zhu, Dong, and Hu et al. (2017); Zhuang et al. (2017)
(2008); Zhu, Mo, and Xie (2009);
Ma, Li, and Cai (2017)

UDBs for policy implementation (see Liang et al. 2018; Wang
et al. 2017).
The constraint-oriented approach, on the other hand, con-
siders predicting future urban development patterns as an
extremely difficult if not impossible task. This approach
focuses on delineation of UDBs as a means to protect the
ecological system and natural resources. It often adopts “bot-
tom-line” thinking, and the boundaries are derived by identify-
ing necessary ecological environments to support critical
ecological services, safeguard basic farmland, and ensure
resource optimization; thus, the boundaries mark absolute pro-
hibitions and restrictions to urban development. Analytical
techniques used in this approach are informed by the ecological
planning methodology and have been expanded by Chinese
scholars in their exploration of the so-called negative approach
to urban growth planning, a term chosen to distinguish the
method’s emphasis on relying on ecological structure and com-
ponents, not the expected urban growth patterns, to determine
urban spatial management boundaries (see Yu, Li, and Han
2005). A number of studies published in Chinese have applied
this method in urban ecological corridor analysis (Qiao and
Yang 2013; Su, Li, and Han 2005), ecological infrastructure
analysis (Yu, Wang, and Li 2011), ecological sensitivity anal-
ysis (Yang et al. 2010; Zhu, Dong, and Hu 2008), ecological
security pattern analysis (Kuang et al. 2016), ecological land
suitability assessment (Zhang et al. 2016; Wang 2012; Wang
et al. 2013; Zhu, Mo, and Xie 2009), and so on.
The constraint-oriented approach specifically involves the
use of the minimum cumulative resistance model that analyzes
the impacts of various ecological and policy factors on urban
development patterns by defining these factors’ resistance to
urban development based on physical characteristics, locational
34
characteristics, and policy conditions. Unlike the growth-driven
approach where magnitude of impacts from various driving
factors is empirically determined via statistical analyses, the
constraint-based approach assigns resistance indexes to differ-
ent characteristics or elements and attaches different weights
(or coefficients) to the constraining factors based on expert
opinion. A weighted sum of resistance scores can be computed
using the indexes and weights for each spatial unit in the
analysis, which results in a resistance surface. Urban expansion
is likely to take place where the resistance score is minimal and
can be overcome; delineation of potential urban expansion
boundaries proceeds by excluding unsuitable areas and by
allowing places with minimal resistance scores to develop until
the development scale meets future projections (Liu and Liang
et al. 2017). By adjusting the indexes and weights assigned to
various aspects and factors, the authors compare UDB out-
comes in multiple scenarios where the importance of different
factors varies.
The third category of articles highlights the need to integrate
spatial tools controlling urban development and protecting the
environment into UDB delineation. Some authors suggested
making additional adjustments to the final UGBs or UDBs
by integrating other policy considerations and by excluding
spatial control areas (e.g., redline ecological areas, restrictive
development areas, farmland protection areas; B. Zheng et al.
2018; Q. Zheng et al. 2017; Zhuang et al. 2017). Others intro-
duced analyses of an urban area’s carrying capacity, determined
by the area’s natural resource capacity, environmental assimi-
lative capacity, ecosystem services capacity, and society sup-
porting capacity, and used the resulting capacity assessment as
an added layer to make adjustment to the UGBs (e.g., exclud-
ing areas of low carrying capacity from the UGB; see Jiang
et al. 2016). Similarly, some studies used the term “ecological
space quality,” determined by land cover characteristics, prox-
imity to identified threats or stressor, and degree of protection,
and uses a layer showing variation in ecological space quality
to refine UGBs (e.g., areas with high ecological space quality
are excluded from UGBs; see Liu and Zhang et al. 2017).
An important suggestion coming out of studies in this cate-
gory is to add flexibility and elasticity in the UGBs and UDBs
as a necessary condition to make them practical and effective.
Recognizing the inherent inability to accurately forecast future
growth in both quantitative and spatial terms, some authors
believe that a flexible, growth-driven UGB or UDB based on
short-term development projection and a rigid UGB or UDB
based on the land needed to support vital ecological services
should coexist. However, there is very little scientific knowl-
edge available to guide the decision on how much land should
be allowed and where the land should be spatially located
between the rigid boundary and the flexible one.
It should be noted that UGBs defined and implemented at
the city region (i.e., prefecture-level city) scale, and adopting
the constraint-oriented approach typically allows a city region
to demarcate its maximum urbanization limit. This UGB
approach often allows multiple boundaries to coexist because
of the presence of multiple but unconnected urbanized areas
Journal of Planning Literature 35(1)
inside a city-region’s boundary (e.g., Liu and Zhang et al.
2017). While UGBs defined in such a way make it possible
to have planned urban expansion compatible with the UGB
implementation, delineation of the UGBs and subsequent
enforcement are susceptible to manipulation by city govern-
ments keen on seeking fiscal revenues through land develop-
ment. For example, substantial urban development can be
permitted or even deliberately expedited inside UGBs of sec-
ondary urban areas in the name of ensuring urban containment
of the central city. Yet, from a regional perspective, such a
development strategy could lead to leapfrog patterns when the
new development cannot create an independent new commu-
nity and instead becomes a bedroom community reliant on the
central city for employment and service opportunities. Recent
studies on new town development in large cities, such as Beij-
ing and Shanghai, highlight this inherent problem (see Tan,
Guy, and Li 2011; Shen and Wu 2017).
Policy Performance
The published literature suggests that currently more than thirty
cities have launched policy processes implementing UDB or
UGB. Some of these cities had experimented with similar spa-
tial tools out of their own initiation prior to the central govern-
ment’s directive. Figure 1 shows the cities whose UDB-related
efforts have been published in the Chinese or English literature
reviewed in this study. It appears cities in a wide range of
geographic locations and diverse population sizes have all been
engaged in UDB exploration. The work done by some of the
largest cities in China, such as Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai,
and Chongqing, has attracted a lot of attention from research-
ers, and each city has been the subject of case studies reported
in multiple articles in either Chinese or English. However, most
of the case studies published so far have been either descriptive
accounts of different UDB delineation methods or debates on
technological and organizational improvements considered
necessary for policy implementation.
Very little published research directly evaluates the perfor-
mance of UDBs or UGBs, although evidence can be found in
some studies indicative of the effectiveness of spatial controls
similar to UDB or UGB. These studies’ efforts to identify
factors affecting policy performance offer insights for speculat-
ing the success of the new tools. Han et al. (2009) and Lai and
Han (2014) studied the urban construction boundaries in Beij-
ing and found the boundaries were unable to control spatial
distribution of urban development. The authors discussed sev-
eral issues related to the boundaries’ failure. From a policy
formulation perspective, the UCBs, adopted mainly for the
purpose of quantity control of urban land, were not supported
by accurate forecasts, and estimation of population growth
lacked flexibility to have timely updates and adjustments. Dur-
ing the policy implementation process, the lack of spatial pre-
cision of UCBs mapped out in plans, inconsistent development
regulation, planners’ insufficient knowledge of UCB spatiality,
and inadequate monitoring of project review and construction
all contributed to the policy’s ineffectiveness. To the extent that
Yang et al. 35

Figure 1. Distribution of cities implementing urban development boundary reported in literature.

these problems may persist in the policy formulation and A few cities’ experiments with a combination of multiple
implementation process for UDBs or UGBs, some authors have spatial tools have resulted in positive outcomes. Shenzhen, for
expressed a less optimistic view of these new spatial tools’ example, is one of the pioneer cities that started using various
success (Yin et al. 2017). spatial instruments early on. The city delineated a UGB in
36
2005 and implemented strict building permit control outside
the scope of the UGB. Since 2009, the city has strengthened
the protection of farmland (or arable land) via several spatially
explicit methods, such as excluding arable land from location
selection for urban project approvals; establishing farmland
protection area based on optimized and aggregated spatial dis-
tribution of farmland areas; encouraging redevelopment in the
city’s built-up areas, especially areas close to the central busi-
ness district; actively monitoring land use change at the urban
fringes via advanced technology (e.g., remote sensing and
drones); and strictly enforcing punishment for violation. The
outcomes have been encouraging—from 2009 to 2014, Shenz-
hen city did not use up its development land quota issued by
the central government; during 2013 and 2014, the city’s land
development was only 20 percent of the quota. The city’s farm-
land area increased by almost 30 percent in 2012 and has
remained stable since then (Qian et al. 2016). Another study
of the city of Hefei by Huang et al. (2013) suggests that imple-
mentation of the “four-zone” spatial control in land use plan-
ning was effective at keeping new land development inside the
“permitted expansion construction zone.”
Summary of Literature and Critique
In this research, we reviewed literature published in English or
Chinese explicitly focusing on the new spatial control instru-
ments UGB or UDB. These development-limiting boundaries
have been promoted by the Chinese central government to
contain urban expansion and balance urban development and
environmental protection. Our review suggests that, while there
is a dearth of evidence suggesting the policy’s impacts, most
literature seems to agree that UGBs or UDBs can be effective
tools for controlling urban sprawl in China based on the per-
ceived success from experiences in the United States, espe-
cially those from the Portland, Oregon, Model (Amstrong
et al. 2015). The literature shows the coexistence of different
approaches to UDB. One approach applies Western-based
urban theories and modeling techniques to analyze Chinese
cities’ urban development trends and extrapolate spatial scope
and form for future urban growth. The second approach,
informed by ecological planning and in response to China’s
need to deal with concerns over ecological security, adopts a
bottom-line strategy that involves various ecological sensitiv-
ity- and suitability-based analytical methods to support the
identification and integration of rigid UDBs for vital environ-
mental protection and for controlling the maximum extent of
urban expansion. The latest literature reported a combination of
both approaches in UDB exploration. The overall existing lit-
erature strengthens the science–policy connection by informing
policy-making’s analytical process, which has usually been
considered weak and inadequate in China’s urban planning
(Long et al. 2011).
While the set of literature under our review is rich in rigor-
ous technical analyses supportive of policy formulation, we
found it lacking in several other areas from a policy studies
perspective: (1) policy implementation ideas and methods
Journal of Planning Literature 35(1)
presented in much of the literature do not seem to have suffi-
cient input from knowledge and insights gained through scien-
tific investigations of China’s urban sprawl problem; (2) the
scope of literature is limited in that important issues pertaining
to a full policy process, such as policy monitoring mechanisms
and evaluations, are not adequately addressed; (3) despite the
increasing recognition for necessary institutional changes to
facilitate coordinated intergovernmental land use decisions to
make UDBs effective, formulation of realistic strategies that
acknowledge political challenges is understudied in the current
literature.
The literature has not adequately linked scientific under-
standing of China’s urban development in devising specific
policy implementation strategies. This issue is apparent in the
literature focusing on a growth-driven approach to UDB, which
uses urban modeling technique (e.g., CA) to analyze past urba-
nization trends and simulate future urban growth. The validity
of those simulation outcomes relies on using the appropriate
and comprehensive urban growth driving factors and employ-
ing correct and consistent transition rules governing nonurban
to urban land use changes. In the past five decades and as the
result of major policy reforms in a number of areas, including
economic planning, housing policies, urban planning, and land
management, just to name a few, China’s urbanization pro-
cesses and patterns have exhibited extreme dynamics shaped
by exceedingly complex and ever-changing driving forces.
While a growing volume of scholarship on China’s urban
development helps illuminate some important factors unique
to China’s urbanization, the literature on UDB does not seem
to acknowledge those findings in the analyses. In other words,
research on the policies aimed at containing urban sprawl in
China has not adequately taken into consideration the effect
these other policies has on land use dynamics.
A more fundamental issue with this history-extrapolated
approach is that it basically allows past decision tendencies,
which were oftentimes shaped by a growth-at-all-cost mind-set,
to influence future choices. As Yeh and Li (2003) pointed out,
the simulated future development may well inherit old land use
problems when the historical data used to calibrate the model’s
decision rules contain undesirable results or failures from the
past. Since China strives for a departure from its old urbaniza-
tion trends, it makes sense for the UDB tool to be formulated
and designed in such a way that it manifests the impacts of new
driving factors and desired decision-making rationalities, while
its subsequent enforcement ensures those driving factors work.
As China continues its top-down approach to urban plan-
ning and management, the effectiveness of UDB policies also
requires improvements and adjustments of many quantity con-
trols adopted in the systems, such as quotas for urban expan-
sion, per capita indexes for different urban land uses, and ratio
indexes for different land uses (see Table 1). These quantity
controls often determine the scale of urban land uses, which
then defines the growth-limiting boundaries’ spatial scope.
Some studies have compared the very different UDBs under
different development scale scenarios (Liu et al. 2017). While
several authors have alluded to the fact that some of these
Yang et al.
quantity indexes are outdated and unrealistic (Zhang et al.
2014), there seems to be a gap in the literature that fails to
address the scientific basis and practical justification underly-
ing those widely used indexes. Since one of the goals associ-
ated with the UDB policy is to improve land use efficiencies
and enhance land use structure, it is necessary to include in the
UDB research a reexamination of the relationship between
quantity targets and UDB-determined urban forms, supported
with a better understanding of those quantity controls’ impacts
on urbanization efficiencies and optimization.
Some important stages in a policy process, such as policy
enforcement, monitoring, and evaluation, received little atten-
tion in the existing UDB literature. This is partly due to the fact
that implementation of the policies has just begun. Much evi-
dence has been accumulated that suggests the ineffectiveness
of many other spatial control tools, and investigation of the
reasons has pointed to the deficiency in imposing strict punish-
ment for noncompliance, lack of public involvement in super-
vision, and inadequate technology for data collection and
sharing. Systematic research is urgently needed to devise a
comprehensive approach to UDB enforcement and monitoring
that involves strengthening its legal basis, identifying suppor-
tive policies in these areas such as taxation and infrastructure
investment, and establishing intelligence infrastructure that
enables open access to complete information related to urban
development. Additionally, UDB policy impact studies should
go beyond focusing on the boundary’s constraining effects on
urbanization to include investigation on potential albeit unin-
tended consequences, such as equity impacts on housing
affordability and economic opportunities for different areas and
different population groups.
Finally, the literature is also lacking critical analyses of the
politics that affect every step of the policy process, an issue
particularly acute in China’s multisystem urban management
regime. While the literature often cites the goal of using UDB
as a means to help with integrating the existing planning sys-
tems, most of the articles address this via a technological
approach by exploring a process that simply combines analy-
tical results from various land management perspectives to
form one blueprint. Some authors have recognized that deci-
sions on many of the spatial control tools may be a negotiated
outcome rather than simply determined by data analyses (Bai
et al. 2018). Additional research is needed on identification of
different stakeholders’ preferences and on mechanisms for con-
sensus building during the UDB policy process.
The newness of UGBs and UDBs in managing China’s
urban growth has limited the amount of published scholarly
work available to our research. Acknowledging the fact that
the set of literature reviewed in this study is by no means
exhaustive in representing the progress in and contribution
to the intellectual pursuit of knowledge about spatial planning
unique to China, we hope our analysis can inspire new areas
of research that will generate knowledge and insights to
inform China’s continuous policy efforts to combat urban
sprawl.
37
Authors’ Note
The development of this article has received contributions from stu-
dent research assistants at the University of Oregon and Remin Uni-
versity of China.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to express appreciation to the three anonymous
reviewers for their constructive comments. The authors would like to
thank Jessica Morey-Collins and Roderick Hall from the University of
Oregon and Lin Sun from Renmin University of China for their help
with literature search and information compilation.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article
is supported by the Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of
China project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Project No.
18YJA630141).
ORCID iD
Lei Zhang https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5705-5753
Notes
1. The National Economic and Social Development Plan, also known
as the Five Year Plan (FYP), started in 1956, and the most recent is
the thirteenth FYP for 2016–2020.
2. The Chinese central government mandated in 2008 that permanent
protection be placed on at least 1.546 billion mu of basic farmland
for the target year of 2020. This national target was then divided
among jurisdictional units in the urban administrative hierarchy to
create minimum basic farmland quota for every jurisdiction from
provinces down to villages and towns.
3. Starting in 2018, the Ministry of Land and Resources has been
dissolved, and its function is now under the newly created Ministry
of Natural Resources.
4. These cities include Beijing, Shenyang, Shanghai, Nanjing, Suz-
hou, Hangzhou, Xiamen, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Shenz-
hen, Chengdu, Xi’an, and Guiyang.
5. A policy studies perspective “involves systematically studying the
nature, causes, and effects of alternative public policies, with par-
ticular emphasis on determining the policies that will achieve given
goals” (Nagel and MacRae 1980, 391). This perspective helps us
define our research scope and guides our analyses of the body of
literature examined in this research. Following this perspective, we
specifically assess the literature’s adequacy in addressing the
nature/causes, the implementation strategies, and the effects of the
urban growth boundary or urban development boundary policies
experimented with by Chinese cities.
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Author Biographies
Yizhao Yang is an associate professor in Department of Planning,
Public Policy and Management, University of Oregon. Email:
yizhao@uoregon.edu
Lei Zhang is an associate professor in Department of Urban Planning
and Management, School of Public Administration and Public Policy,
Renmin University of China. Email: leizhang1976@ruc.edu.cn;
thirstone1976@vip.sina.com
Yumin Ye is a professor in Department of Urban Planning and Man-
agement, School of Public Administration and Public Policy, Renmin
University of China. Email: yymzcy@vip.sina.com
Zhifang Wang is an associate professor in College of Architecture
and Landscape Architecture, Peking University. Email: zhifangw@
pku.edu.cn