Shenzhen is a city that is highly representative of China's rapid urbanization process. As the city rapidly expands, there are enormous challenges to the sustainable use of land resources. This paper introduces the evolution of urban land expansion and the sustainable land use policy of the Shenzhen Government since 2005. The policy covers the reduction in rural-to-urban land conversion, the delineation of urban growth boundaries, arable land reclamation and the establishment of farmland protection areas, urban redevelopment, and the investigation and prosecution of illegal construction. This paper considers the aspects of urbanization and land management systems that are unique to China. The current top-down indicative and mandatory mode of control, which relies on the central government, has very limited effects. Good results were achieved in Shenzhen for the following elements: governmental self-restraint, governmental identity change, and policy innovation. Shenzhen's sustainable land use practices can provide a reference for other cities in China.

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Landscape patterns are significantly affected during the urbanization process. Identifying the spatiotemporal impacts of urbanization’s socio-economic factors on landscape patterns is very important and can provide scientific evidence to support urban ecological management and guide managers to establish appropriate sustainability policies. This article applies multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) to reveal the relationships between landscape patterns and the socio-economic factors of urbanization in Shenzhen, China, from 2000 to 2015, in five-year intervals. MGWR is a powerful extension of geographically weighted regression (GWR) that can not only reveal spatial heterogeneity patterns but also measure the operational scale of covariates. The empirical results indicate that MGWR is superior to GWR. Furthermore, the changes in operational scale represented by the spatial bandwidth of MGWR in different years reflect temporal changes in the spatial relationships of given factors, which is significant information for urban studies. These multiscale relationships between landscape patterns and the socio-economic factors of urbanization, revealed via MGWR, are useful for strategic planning around urban dynamic development and land resource and ecological landscape management. The results can provide additional insight into landscape and urbanization studies from a multiscale perspective, which is important for local, regional, and global urban planning.

Rapid urbanization and rapid urban growth present great challenges to the sustainable utilization of land resources. This paper discusses the on-going process of construction-to-ecological land conversion (CELC) in terms of three aspects: land use, environmental effects, and system responses. CELC is compared to other current land conversion strategies in China. Taking Shenzhen City as an example, this paper introduces five areas in which CELC has been implemented since 2009, including basic farmland protection zones, mining areas, ecological corridors, inefficient industrial zones, and urban villages. This paper argues that Shenzhen's CELC model can improve the ecological environment, control urban sprawl, and promote sustainable land use and, thus, serve as an example for other cities in China.