Urban Spatial Restructuring in Transitional Economy——Changing Land Use Pattern in Shanghai

For almost three decades, China has been undergoing significant transition from a planned economy to a market economy. Fast-paced economic growth and urbanization, interacting with market-oriented reforms in land re-sources allocation, have caused profound spatial restructuring of Chinese cities. This paper examines urban expansion and land use reconfiguration in Shanghai's central city from 1979 to 2002, with a special focus on the effect of the adoption of the land-leasing system in 1988. The empirical research, which employs GIS-based spatial analysis tech-niques to explore land use data for multiple years, indicates fundamental changes in the spatial characteristics of urban development in Shanghai after this important land policy reform.