WU Wen-Jie, ZHANG Wen-Zhong, DONG Guan-Peng, LIU Rui
Transitions in the socio-economic environment have significant influences on reshaping the cities. While the western countries are undergoing post-urbanization changes, the transforming in Chinese urban land market can better reflect the trend of urban spatial reconstruction. In fact, dramatic socio-economic reforms in China are affecting the most Chinese cities’ urban form since 1978. After that, the new approaches to land marketization widely spread to most Chinese cities, and ever since the late 1980s, Beijing municipal government has attempted to rationalize the previously planned urban land use distribution system by the way of economic reform measures. As the market economy has been established, Beijing's residential land market has been booming during the periods with different land reform policy. While the Chinese urban land market reform has been the subject of much research in recent decades, recent literatures have paid attention to spatial features of land price in transitional Chinese cities, and in comparison to its counterparts in advanced market economies. Nonetheless, research on this issue has been limited by the lack of systematic data, especially spatial data, on land leasing parcels as well as other related data sources. This paper gives first attempt to add our understanding of the spatial variations of the residential land bid-rent function curve of the residential land market of a rapidly developing Chinese metropolis, Beijing—China’s capital city, based on the Beijing Land Leasing Parcel Database. By employing about 3 400 residential land leasing parcel data from 1992 to 2009 within the 6th ring road of Beijing metropolitan area, the period when the land leasing market has largely been established, a mono-centric city’s land bid-rent function model was established to quantitatively explore the spatio-temporal evolution of urban residential land development mode and its mechanism. Based on the empirical analysis, it can be observed that in the context of transformation and urban spatial reconstruction, price signal is applicable in the booming land market in Beijing and becomes the most important influencing factor in forming the unbalanced residential land market's spatial pattern. Specifically, the price gradient is generally negative from the city center to the city fringes. Meanwhile, the results provide a strong evidence that in the context of some special urbanization phenomenon in China such as the rapid development of urban transportation technology, the formation of urban sub-centers, the rising of urban village, the residential land bid-rent curve in Beijing has the increasing, decreasing, fluctuation mode, which is different with its counterparts in advanced market economies. This empirical result verified the efficiency of China’s emerging land market and it would enrich the existing knowledge of the emerging urban land market in transitional China, and provide information for further land and housing policy making.
