Urban vacant land in rapidly urbanized areas: Status, micro-level drivers, and implications

The existence of vacant land is a worldwide phenomenon. However, few studies have used quantitative methods to focus on the micro-level drivers that cause land to remain vacant in small towns. In this study, we determined the ordered utilization status of vacant land in N County of Zhejiang Province, China, via visual inspection of high-resolution images captured in 2014, and identified the micro-level drivers of continued land vacancy using ordinal logistic regression. The results show that 57% of the newly supplied land, converted from agricultural land to urban land, released between 2006 and 2012 in N County was still unutilized or underutilized in 2014. Micro-level drivers, including elevation, distance to the industrial park, number of urban land units within the neighborhood, and the vacant years, positively affected the utilization rate of urban land. In contrast, the slope, distance to water, and distance to built-up areas had a negative effect. To address the continuing prevalence of vacant land, N County should prioritize the micro-level drivers of positive land use and strengthen post-land-supply supervision. This study provides a micro perspective for studying the drivers of vacant land prevalence and a decision-making framework in small towns of China to formulate land-supply schemes.