Urban Spatial Blessing: Effect of Land Use Intensity on Human Development Index

Urban land use is characterized by pronounced externalities. In most developing countries, economic welfare considerations drive the changes in land use intensity, leading to the spatial reallocation of resources and thereby affecting the enhancement of urban welfare. This study combined multi-source data to construct a panel dataset of 284 prefectural-level and above cities in China from 2011 to 2022, and employed the spatial Durbin model, spatial heterogeneity model, and spatial mechanism model to systematically analyze the spatial spillover effects of urban land use intensity (ULUI) on urban welfare (Human Development Index, HDI), its heterogeneity, and the underlying influencing mechanisms. The study concluded that: (i) Both HDI and ULUI have shown certain improvement despite some distinct regional heterogeneity; (ii) ULUI significantly contributes to local urban welfare, yet exerts a negative spatial spillover effect on neighboring cities, and the effective boundary of this spillover effect is 400 km. (iii) Spatial spillover heterogeneity analysis revealed that the spillover effect of ULUI on HDI is negative for non-eastern and non-megacities, whereas it is positive for eastern and megacities, though the estimated coefficients are relatively small. (iv) In terms of the spatial influencing mechanism, industrial rationalization, industrial advancement, and economic agglomeration in the market dimension, as well as expenditure scaling, expenditure structuring, and public serviceability in the non-market dimension, are essential channels for ULUI to affect the HDI of both local and neighboring cities. The results indicate that the current “land-based” land use is not conducive to the enhancement of regional welfare, and there is an urgent need for better understanding the principles of factor allocation and agglomeration, establishing cross-regional synergistic mechanisms, and fully leveraging the comparative advantages of geographic conditions and scale effects across different cities, so as to improve the urban space welfare.