Comparison of the Use Intensity of Rural Residential Land in Different Urban Functional Areas in the Suburbs of Beijing

With the development of economy and rising living standards of farmers, villagers invest an increasing proportion of their incomes in housing to improve the overall living conditions and quality of life. However, most villages do not seem to be planned in this process. Being situated on or alongside arable land and the per capita floor space nearly doubled, a growing percentage of households own multiple dwellings. This has caused increasing areas of farmland to be used for dwellings and a waste of rural land resources. Studying intensive rural residential land use would therefore be helpful for addressing a series of issues arising. In order to reveal the diversity of the intensive use degree in different areas with different location features and economic development levels, in this study, three typical regions with characteristics of urban functional areas and different economic levels were chosen to compare and analyze. Methods of the single factor against the goal and the multiple-factor index were used from aspects of rural residential land intensity, structure, and pattern for measuring the degree of intensive use of rural residential land. Furthermore, the regional difference and its influencing factors of rural residential use intensity between the chosen study areas were analyzed. Suggestions were given to enhance the construction of new countryside and promote an all-around development in urban and rural areas. The rural residential land use intensive shows certain regional differences, but they are not remarkable. Analysis of the synthetic intensive degree shows HaidianShunyiPinggu, and the order of the intensive degree seems to be in accord with the order of macro-location features and economic levels. In terms of respective intensive degree, there exist significant differences, i.e., HaidianPingguShunyi with respect to rural residential land intensity, Shunyi HaidianPinggu with respect to rural residential land structure, and ShunyiPinggu Haidian with respect to rural residential land pattern. These differences are primarily caused by differences in population, government guidance, geographic and geomorphic conditions, land use planning, and so on. Strengthening urban planning and land pattern adjustment, accelerating the relocation of industrial land from rural residential internal areas to industrial parks, improving the capacity of rural residential land, and increasing inputs of industrial land can be considered the main trends towards the construction of new rural communities in the future. In short, rural economic and social development needs an intensive use system of rural residential land.