Shenzhen is a city that is highly representative of China’s rapid urbanization process. As the city rapidly expands, there are enormous challenges to the sustainable use of land resources. This paper introduces the evolution of urban land expansion and the sustainable land use policy of the Shenzhen Government since 2005. The policy covers the reduction in rural-to-urban land conversion, the delineation of urban growth boundaries, arable land reclamation and the establishment of farmland protection areas, urban redevelopment, and the investigation and prosecution of illegal construction. This paper considers the aspects of urbanization and land management systems that are unique to China. The current top-down indicative and mandatory mode of control, which relies on the central government, has very limited effects. Good results were achieved in Shenzhen for the following elements: governmental self-restraint, governmental identity change, and policy innovation. Shenzhen’s sustainable land use practices can provide a reference for other cities in China.

Landscape patterns are significantly affected during the urbanization process. Identifying the spatiotemporal impacts of urbanization’s socio-economic factors on landscape patterns is very important and can provide scientific evidence to support urban ecological management and guide managers to establish appropriate sustainability policies. This article applies multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) to reveal the relationships between landscape patterns and the socio-economic factors of urbanization in Shenzhen, China, from 2000 to 2015, in five-year intervals. MGWR is a powerful extension of geographically weighted regression (GWR) that can not only reveal spatial heterogeneity patterns but also measure the operational scale of covariates. The empirical results indicate that MGWR is superior to GWR. Furthermore, the changes in operational scale represented by the spatial bandwidth of MGWR in different years reflect temporal changes in the spatial relationships of given factors, which is significant information for urban studies. These multiscale relationships between landscape patterns and the socio-economic factors of urbanization, revealed via MGWR, are useful for strategic planning around urban dynamic development and land resource and ecological landscape management. The results can provide additional insight into landscape and urbanization studies from a multiscale perspective, which is important for local, regional, and global urban planning.

Analyzing the factors influencing emerging industry land use change is important for promoting industrial transformation and for upgrading and improving the level of intensive use of emerging industry land. In recent years, to solve the problem of land resource shortage and expansion space, Shenzhen has implemented a strategy of promoting urban development through technological innovation and has actively promoted the transformation of inefficient industrial land to emerging industry. This article introduces the development, land use types, and spatial distribution of Shenzhen’s emerging industries. Based on the logistic regression model, we analyze the differences between the factors influencing changes in land use for both emerging and traditional industry. The research results show that the distance from public roads, the distance from highways, the distance from railway freight stations, the proportion of secondary industry, and the proportion of tertiary industry are important explanatory variables for the two types of land use change. Traditional industrial land use is also affected by the land slope, the distance from ports, the population, and fixed asset investment. Emerging industry land use is also affected by the distance from the airport, the number of railway stations, the quality of the population, and innovation-driving forces. These results provide a reference for government to rationally plan emerging industry land and differentiated management of this, in order to fill the current research gap in the field of land use change, and to contribute to research revealing the mechanisms driving changes in emerging industrial land.

Rapid urbanization and rapid urban growth present great challenges to the sustainable utilization of land resources. This paper discusses the on-going process of construction-to-ecological land conversion (CELC) in terms of three aspects: land use, environmental effects, and system responses. CELC is compared to other current land conversion strategies in China. Taking Shenzhen City as an example, this paper introduces five areas in which CELC has been implemented since 2009, including basic farmland protection zones, mining areas, ecological corridors, inefficient industrial zones, and urban villages. This paper argues that Shenzhen’s CELC model can improve the ecological environment, control urban sprawl, and promote sustainable land use and, thus, serve as an example for other cities in China.