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Abstract
This paper aims to investigate human-environment interactions in the Chinese context by studying land-use change in terms of agglomeration of human activities. The research is based on theories showing that resource flows agglomerate differently in the spatial dimension. The paper creates the urban-rural linkage index and decomposes the study area into three parts: urban, peri-urban and periphery areas. Research findings show that urban areas tend to experience faster arable land and built land change than the peri-urban and periphery areas. The findings also indicate that in the Chinese context of fast urbanization and economic growth, resource flows like people, capital, goods and information tend to agglomerate in the urban areas, followed by the small towns and medium cities, as well as the rural peripheries.
Keywords: Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region, human-environment interactions, land-use change, urban- rural resource flows
Introduction
Human-environment interactions have been an impor- tant research topic since the 1940s. In the sphere of human ecology, adaptation, ecosystems, and systems approach are particularly relevant to understanding the study of human-en- vironment interactions (Galvin, 2006). Basically, these con- cepts explain how people live in the environment and how people change the environment to meet their needs and wants. The idea of involving humans as a natural component of ecosystems resulted in the need to understand how humans interact with the natural environment. Human history in the past centuries has shown how we use nature to meet our needs, and how the environment is affected by human activi- ties. This is particularly evident in East Asian regions where rapid urbanization is often coupled with rapid industrializa- tion and economic development. China, for instance, saw a decrease of 8.3 million square hectares of arable land from 1996 to 2008 as its urbanization rate rose from 30.5% to 45.7% (Ministry of Land and Resources of the People's Re- public of China, 2009). Due to mass population influx, cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Zhengzhou are in a state of ap- proaching water crisis while the water supply of Guangzhou and Chongqing is in an alarming state (Xu, Yu, & Wu, 2007). Seemingly, human activities in East Asian regions like China have over-influenced the natural environment, and induced an imbalance of man-nature. Bai and Imura (2000) also point out that...