Associate Professor Shi Lifeng from the School of Public Policy & Management  (School of Emergency Management) published a paper titled “The Decreasing Housing Utilization Efficiency in China’s Cities” in the online edition of Nature Cities, a subsidiary journal of Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s44284-024-00177-8). This is the first paper published on Nature Cities with CUMT as the first affiliated institution. Associate Professor Shi Lifeng is both the first author and the corresponding author of the paper. This paper is co-authored by researchers from Nanjing University, the Remote Sensing Data Center of the German Aerospace Center, and the University of Würzburg, Germany.

Compared to most countries with high urbanization rates, China does not face a shortage of urban housing; instead, it experiences an oversupply of urban housing. In this study, the author introduced the concept of "housing utilization efficiency" as a metric to quantify the discrepancy between urban housing supply and demand. Specifically, housing utilization efficiency is defined as the ratio of the actual population residing within a given spatial unit to its theoretical maximum population capacity. Based on this definition, the research team developed an evaluation framework that integrates multi-source emerging big data to measure the housing utilization efficiency of cities across China from 2010 to 2020 at a high spatial resolution. Furthermore, the study delves into the evolution patterns of urban housing utilization efficiency in China at various spatial scales, ranging from the street level to the city and regional levels, between 2010 and 2020.

It was found that the housing utilization efficiency in highly urbanized areas of China has shown a declining trend since 2010, dropping from 84% in 2010 to 78% in 2020. During this decade, the cities experiencing the most significant declines in housing utilization efficiency were predominantly located in the northern part of the Yangtze River Delta and the Shandong Peninsula, with decreases generally ranging from 10% to 20%. Particularly noteworthy is that smaller cities have witnessed a more pronounced decline in housing utilization efficiency compared to larger cities. Additionally, an unexpected finding of the study was the noticeable decrease in housing utilization efficiency in old urban districts located at the center of core urban areas between 2010 and 2020.

Associate Professor Shi Lifeng has been dedicated to utilizing multi-source geospatial big data technology to identify and quantify the spatial characteristics of urbanization in China. This study represents a collection of his previous research in the field, with interim findings from these earlier studies having been published on Landscape and Urban Planning, a prestigious urban studies journal.

Full Text:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-024-00177-8