An Integrated Land Use and Transport Model to Examine Polycentric Policies of Beijing

Beijing’s fast urban growth has caused serious traffic congestion and great environmental damage. The government plans to develop sub-centres in its metropolitan area to ease the pressures associated with being a sole, centralized city service provider. This has been formalized in its recently published master plan, the ‘Beijing City Master Plan (BCMP), 2004-2020’ (BCMP), which targets the formation of the city plan up to 2020. This study develops a general land-use and transport interaction model to forecast the housing rent distribution based on the present land-use policies and examines whether the objective of decentralized multi-centres can be achieved based on a ‘business as usual’ scenario. Modelling results show that as of 2020 there will be no sub-centres formed around urban Beijing. Some zones demonstrate the potential to become sub-centres with higher rent increases than the surrounding zones. However, the distribution of these potential zones has a different spatial pattern from what the master plan anticipates. This work may well provide a modelling tool for China’s decision makers to examine land-use policies before putting them into practice