Chinese Idle Land

As a country developing at a high speed, China is at the stage of rapid urbanization, and more and more Chinese cities witness counter urbanization and deindustrialization. The speed of increase of urban land area in some regions is faster than that of corresponding population urbanization, leading to downtrend of land utilization.

As a result, the phenomenon of land oversupply emerges, resulting in vacant lots in city. Due to the principle of land rent maximization, scarcity of available land leads to land division for various uses.

To land users, as their needs for land use increase, lots divided will be abandoned because they can’t meet users’ further needs, and that’s why many cities have unused or abandoned lots.

including currently unused lots without any building and abandoned lots with buildings, most of which are on both sides of road and overpass or between residential land, business land, and industrial land, and thus very hard to find.

In the meantime, because there is a large urban population in China nowadays given its relatively small urban land area, there is only a small number of vacant lots. People will utilize these vacant lots for parking lot, driving school, amusement park, etc. through legal or even illegal means. It’s these “reutilizations” that give these vacant lots various attributes.