Evolution of rural settlements in the Tongzhou District of Beijing under the new-type urbanization policies

In 2014, China launched its latest urbanization strategy, the National New-type Urbanization Plan, to promote scientific and reasonable urbanization modes. China's new-type urbanization policy not only affects urban development, but will also have significant impacts on the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese farmers as well as on the use modes of rural settlements. A thorough analysis of the impacts of new-type urbanization policies on the pattern evolution of rural settlements is therefore critical for developing and proposing a science-based layout scheme of rural settlements and for guiding the development and evolution of rural settlements in a reasonable manner. In this paper, we use the Tongzhou District of Beijing, one of China's new-type urbanization pilot areas, as an example. Applying the CLUE-S model to analyze the impacts of new-type urbanization policies, we simulate the potential influences of the implementation of these policies on the pattern evolution of rural settlements. Based on the results, the implementation of new-type urbanization policies has significant influences on both urban and rural population migration, mainly through the reform of the household registration system. The results further suggest that these policies have significant impacts on the land use scale as well as on the spatial patterns of rural settlements. By 2030, under the scenario of new-type urbanization, the land use scale of rural settlements in Tongzhou District would increase by 0.79% compared with that under the scenario of conventional urbanization. In terms of spatial distribution under new-type urbanization, land use of rural settlements would mainly compete with that of urban land and grassland. We conclude that the spatial distribution of rural settlements in Tongzhou District can be improved and better regulated via reasonable planning.