PATTERNS OF LAND USE OF LARGE TOWNS IN SOUTHERN JIANGSU PROVINCE AND ITS SPATIAL PLANNING

Southern Jiangsu Province, which consists of Suzhou, Wuxi and Changzhou Municipality, is one of the most developed rural areas in China. Towns have contributed a lot to urbanization, which is an outstanding feature of the Southern Jiangsu ode. Town planning has reached high tide in Southern Jiangsu Province since 1990. Towns in Southern Jiangsu Province are relative large and their function planned and land use are more complex, therefore, it is necessary to summarize the planning of large town theoretically. In this paper, the typical developmental characteristics of large towns in Southern Jiangsu province are firstly summarized, and then corresponding planning thoughts are put forward. Based on cases from the six towns of Southern Jiangsu province, the planning of large town are discussed from four aspects: First, town character, scale and the selection of main industry; Second, designing of road network and planning of traffic; Third, distribution of public land use; and fourth, function distribution, and patterns of town land use structure. Special emphasis is laid on the methods of humanism planning and the patterns of land use structure of large towns in Southern Jiangsu Province. The research shows that four types of function distribution and land use structure, which include the same flake and compact one, the same flake and dispersed one, the same flake and two center one, and the two flake composed one, exist in the spatial planning of large towns in Southern Jiangsu Province. Finally, it is argued that it is necessary to deal with the relationship between reconstructing of old districts and development of new ones in a suitable way, to divide stages of construction in order to ensure the rational evolution of spatial form of towns, and to embody the spatial relationship between towns and rural region around them in the spatial planning.