Spatial Optimization and Sustainable Development of Land Use

Dear Colleagues,

As a spatial carrier for all human activities, land use provides the fundamental basis that any production activity must rely on. The “sustainability” in land use is hence an important guarantee for economic prosperity, ecological civilization, as well as sustainable development in resources and the environment. Nevertheless, the “sustainability” in land use cannot be achieved without spatial optimizations of it, which critically determines whether the allocation of land resources is efficient or not.

With regard to spatial optimizations of land use, the two questions of “what to do” and “where to do” pose the greatest difficulties, i.e., the information about the exact amount and structure of land that meets the specific demand of a particular locality is not always available. A useful start of solving these difficulties could be an exploration of the nonlinear synergies between natural and human processes. This new start requires optimization models and algorithms that manifest the unstructured nature of the specified synergies, enable nonlinear solutions and multi-objective collaboration, couple and compute the current mass spatial knowledge, and project the demand of intensive collaborative optimization of land use. It directly challenges the traditional optimization models and algorithms that are simply data-driven, serial computing mode-based, and geographic processes-orientated only. For example, the commonly used methods of operations research, including linear programming model, goal programming, and multiple criteria decision making, mainly focus on the adjustment and optimization of the composition of land quantity, leaving a sense of lacking spatial optimization capability. In view of these problems that the urban and land scholars and decision-makers desire to solve, we here call for a renaissance in the research on the spatial optimization of land use, including new models, new expressions, and new computations.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Decisions models of land informatization;
• Sustainable land use goals for SDGs;
• Big data analytics in land use;
• Optimal land use allocation towards a low-carbon future;
• Simulation of land use dynamics;
• Artificial intelligence in land use optimization;
• The theory or method of using urban big data to monitor land development;
• Low-carbon oriented land use structure optimization.

Dr. Qingsong He
Dr. Linzi Zheng
Dr. Peng Zhou
Prof. Dr. Jiang Zhou
Guest Editors

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• land use
• sustainable development
• spatial optimization