Climate-Conscious Urban Growth Mitigates Urban Warming: Evidence from Shenzhen, China

Abstract

Urban growth comes with significant warming impacts and related increases in air pollution concentrations, so many cities have implemented growth management to minimize "sprawl" and its environmental consequences. However, controlling the amount of growth is costly. Therefore, in this Article, we focus on urban warming and investigate whether climate-conscious urban growth planning (CUGP), that is, urban growth with the same magnitude but optimized spatial arrangements, brings significant mitigation effects. First, the classical spatial multiobjective land-use optimization (SMOLA) model is improved by integrating the spatially, diurnally, and compositionally varying associations between land-use and their warming impacts. We then solve the improved model using the nondominated genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to generate urban growth plans with minimal warming impacts and minimal cost of change without reducing the amount of urban growth. Results show that climate-conscious urban growth brings 33.3 ± 4.6% less warming impacts as compared to unplanned urban growth in Shenzhen, China, and suggest a compact and spatially equalized development pattern. This study provides evidence that spatial planning tools such as the CUGP can help mitigate human impacts on the environment. Meanwhile, the improved SMOLA model could be applied to balance urban development and other environmental consequences such as air pollution.