Implementation Process of General Land-Use Planning and Its Adjustment—A Case Study of Rongchang District in Chongqing, China

Abstract

General land-use planning has a critical role and a guiding significance for economic and regional social development. To increase the ability of planning to cope with regional economic changes in an orderly manner and to defend the legal status of the planning guidance role, this article takes Rongchang District as a case study. This study combines GIS spatial analysis to select speed indicators, the center of gravity offset theory, and the spatial fit model and analyses the implementation process and the adjustment situation of planning from the perspectives of ‘quantity’, ‘time’, and ‘space’. The main results are as follows: (1) The completion rate of cultivated land and the surplus rate of urban land show that planning can effectively guide the direction of land use, with the results of 101.9% and 15%, respectively. The difficulty of planning implementation lies in the control of rural residential land because the actual annual average withdrawal rate of rural residential land is less than one-third of the planned rate, with an actual withdrawal area of 97.22 hm2 per year on average. (2) The results of the spatial coincidence degree and the barycentric offset angle demonstrate that planning plays a prominent role in guiding the direction of land use, although deviations remain between planned and actual land-use demand, with values ranging from 0.9 to 1 and an angle of less than 30° between the implementation process and the target year. (3) From 2013 to 2015, the planning of the study area was adjusted 32 times with an area of 2301.7 hm2. This finding indicates that planning is characterized by frequent disorder and that the gap between land use and planning is alleviated at the cost of the planning authority. (4) The degree of the coincidence between the adjusted plan and the land-use change data decreased year by year, reaching 0.99 two years after implementation of the plan, which is closest to the actual land demand. Thus, general land-use planning can guide the direction of land use to some extent, and the adjustment of planning can alleviate the contradictions of land-use demand under the changes of economic development, but the disorder ignores the legal status of planning. Making regular dynamic adjustments to the plan can provide ideas for planning compilation and revision while maintaining economic benefits and guiding functions without losing legal status.