Why does urbanization construction need a land protection law?
The new-type urbanization strategy and urban growth management practices at home and abroad objectively require China to formulate policies and laws in a timely manner to respond to the impact of the rapid urbanization process on land protection.
Aldo Leopold, the founder of America's new environmental theory, carefully observed and pondered the relationship and fate of humanity and the land, and in A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, raised a series of land environment protection issues. However, at that time the United States, full of confidence in postwar economic recovery, was conquering nature and exploiting land, and paid no attention to the concepts of the “land community” and the “land ethic” emphasized in this book.
Emerging problems drive changes in land management methods
In the 1960s and 1970s, many American cities expanded in a low-density, disorderly manner, devouring large amounts of farmland resources and natural landscapes and bringing serious social, economic and environmental problems; suburbanization caused the decline of old urban centers, low efficiency of municipal facilities, traffic congestion, and a lack of community atmosphere in the suburbs, producing many negative effects on urban development. To solve these problems, American academia, planning agencies, government departments and real estate groups rethought the urban development model, and “America's growth ethic was challenged; it was no longer accepted unreservedly as a precondition for progress.” In 1971, Fred P. Bosselman and David L. Callies wrote The Quiet Revolution in Land Use Control, pointing out that America's land management methods were undergoing a revolution within the scope of law, and that American state governments and regional agencies should regulate the poorly managed land market by issuing plans and policies.
In 1973, Oregon Senate Bill 100 enacted Oregon's land use regulatory system and at the same time created the Land Conservation and Development Commission and its subordinate Department of Land Conservation and Development. The Department of Land Conservation and Development is responsible for reviewing and approving all local plans and related analysis reports, ensuring that the processes and results of local plans of all kinds (including urban growth boundaries) are consistent with statewide planning goals and related action principles. Oregon was the first in the United States to create a statewide planning system, establish the concept of the “urban growth boundary” and its implementation methods, and set up a strict approval system for public participation and oversight. In 1976, Salem, the capital of Oregon, was the first to adopt an “urban growth boundary” to delineate the urban development area. The so-called “urban growth boundary” uses a hypothetical line to divide urban and non-urban land (farmland, woodland and so on), and through low-density land use policies and zoning control techniques restricts urban land use, preventing the city from developing beyond the growth boundary. The “urban growth boundary” achieves an orderly and efficient transition from agricultural land to urban land, meets the land needs of urban population and urban employment within the urban growth boundary, ensures effective use of land, promotes compact growth of existing urban areas, and protects farms, woodland and open space, providing livable communities.
Oregon's “urban growth boundary” policy is subject to strict state legislative management, with approval handled by management departments at the state level, and its establishment, implementation and updating are based on scientific grounds. Oregon law stipulates that each county must annually report to the state Land Conservation and Development Commission on all its decisions concerning land use and land division permit applications in areas for farmland, forest, ranch and mixed use. About 16 million acres of privately owned land in Oregon lie in exclusive agricultural zones, under the statutory jurisdiction of the state planning system. The zoning law of exclusive agricultural zones prohibits land from being used for urban purposes, such as residential areas, shopping malls or parks. The Oregon state government protects resource land through land management policies such as establishing exclusive agricultural zones, forest zones, agricultural-forest zones, urban reserve areas, rural reserve areas and a system for transferring land development rights, ensuring that urban land within the urban growth boundary can be used efficiently; it guides urban expansion through phased development of urban infrastructure; and it regulates land use through tax policies.
American urbanization: “the shift from urban sprawl to smart growth”
The compact urbanization model has protected large amounts of rural land from being occupied by urban development and construction. To date, Oregon has more than 240 “urban growth boundaries”, among which the “urban growth boundary” of the Portland metropolitan area covers the largest area. When disorderly sprawl was common in American cities, compact urbanization represented by Portland protected large amounts of rural land from being occupied by urban development and construction. In addition, cities such as Seattle in Washington State, San Jose in California, Miami in Florida and the Twin Cities in Minnesota also effectively controlled their urban scale and land area by adopting the “urban growth boundary” model in planning practice.
At the same time, American scholars have continuously enriched the theory of urban land management policy. Among these, “land use zoning” is regarded as an important part of the study of American land use control, “the shift from urban sprawl to smart growth” has become a dedicated chapter in the American law school casebook Cases and Materials on Land Use, and “growth management” is discussed in detail in many monographs and textbooks on land law. Research on land protection policies and laws has generated diverse research methods and innovative approaches in interdisciplinary research abroad.
⟦NL> Sprawl-type urban expansion leads to the urbanization of large amounts of land, and the fragmentation of ecological spaces such as farmland, wetlands and mountain forests has become a common phenomenon in today's world, drawing the attention of government officials and researchers in the fields of planning and management in various countries. Western scholars also continue to focus on the environmental problems caused by urban expansion in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Jorge Hardoy, using a comparative research method, summarized in the book Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World the attention paid to land use law and how sustainable development was advanced in Brazil, China, Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom over the past ten to twenty years.
Establishing a land protection law is urgent
China is transitioning from a society dominated by traditional agriculture to a modern industrialized, urbanized society. The American economist Joseph Stiglitz called China's urbanization process one of the two things that “in the 21st century will influence the course of world history and change the face of the world.” Since reform and opening up, China's rapid urbanization process has caused serious land problems, such as sprawl-type urban expansion leading to the urbanization of large amounts of land; large-scale land enclosures in the name of urbanization; and serious idle and wasted land. The reason behind these land problems is that the concepts of China's legal system for land protection lag behind, the system is incomplete, and the operation of the system can no longer keep up with the rapidly developing urbanization process.
Land use and protection, as the core issue of urban growth management, urgently need policy and legal responses. On the premise of studying the many factors and development characteristics of Chinese cities, such as society, economy, culture and resources, integrating the “urban growth boundary” into China's urban planning system, drawing on America's urban growth management policies, absorbing America's experience in managing urban sprawl and localizing it, and promoting the quality improvement and transformation of China's urbanization have outstanding practical significance. In July 2014, China's Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the Ministry of Land and Resources jointly designated 14 cities across the country to carry out pilot work on delineating urban development boundaries, aiming to transform the mode of urban development and land use. The Opinions on Accelerating the Advancement of Ecological Civilization Construction, published in 2015, emphasized “vigorously promoting green urbanization.” This programmatic document set out tasks for the rule-of-law construction of land protection in the new-type urbanization strategy, clearly requiring that we “scientifically determine the intensity of urban development, improve urban land use efficiency and the population density of built-up areas, delineate urban development boundaries, strictly control the supply of urban construction land, and drive the transformation of urbanization development from extensive expansion to connotative improvement.”
In China, promoting a compact, continuous spatial development model for cities, building ecological cities and strengthening the rule of law for land protection are key to all the work. In view of the very few provisions on land protection in current laws and regulations, scholars have called for establishing the principle of economical and intensive land use in China's land legal system, establishing a new land use category, namely “ecological land,” and its legal system, advocating replacing traditional administrative control, which has excessively high institutional costs, with incentive-based land use regulation, and eliminating the “urban-rural dual structure” in environmental legislation.
The new-type urbanization strategy and urban growth management practices at home and abroad objectively require China to formulate policies and laws in a timely manner to respond to the impact of the rapid urbanization process on land protection. To promote the rule-of-law construction of land protection in China's new-type urbanization development strategy, we should build an urban development evaluation system guided by the concept of ecological civilization, taking resource consumption, environmental damage and ecological benefits as important indicators of the urban development evaluation system; comprehensively build a land protection institutional system led by the land planning system, centered on the land use control system, and backed by the system for holding parties accountable for ecological protection; establish urban environmental spatial planning and control systems represented by systems such as the urban environmental master plan and urban ecological protection red lines; and establish implementation mechanisms and safeguard mechanisms for land protection in urban construction.
Only by deeply recognizing the importance and urgency of the rule-of-law construction of land protection in China's new-type urbanization development strategy can we better help China “firmly grasp the correct direction and embark on a path of new-type urbanization.”