How to Measure Urban Land Use Intensity? A Perspective of Multi-Objective Decision in Wuhan Urban Agglomeration, China

Urban land intensive use is an important part of regional planning and plays an important role in the sustainable development of cities. However, the research on how to measure urban land use intensity is still controversial. This paper gives a perspective of multi-objective decision to explore the criterion of urban land use intensity in the process of urbanization. The theory of factor substitution was applied to analyze the mechanism of urban land intensive use in different urbanization stage. Additionally, the matching degree model (MDM), curve estimation model, and multi-objective programming model were employed in the case study of Wuhan urban agglomeration to give a multi-objective decision on urban land intensive use. The results show that the level of urban land intensive use lagging behind the level of urbanization development in more than 60% of the counties. When the level of urbanization is less than 30%, 30–70% and greater than 70%, the optimal intensity of urban land use characterized by fixed investments of unit land is 2.6252, 4.6132, and 6.7648 million RMB respectively. Based on optimal intensity, the counties in Wuhan urban agglomeration were divided into key development zone and optimized development zone. Finally, different management strategies were designed for different zones for urban land intensive use.