Urban Coastal Zone Planning: A Case Study Of Xiamen City

The coastal zone is a continuum of land and sea with very rich natural resource and has attracted most economic development activities related to sea exploitation. A coastal city's coastal zone, also a part of the coastal zone, is the focal zone of coastal economic activities and a new economic development axis of the coastal city. Nevertheless, urban coastal zones of most coastal cities are faced with disordered costal resource utilization and spatial conflict among various coastal economic activities, which are leading to the deterioration of the coastal ecosystem and block the sustainable development of the urban coastal zone and the whole city. The urban coastal zone planning has become a focal point in the study of worldwide coastal zone development planning, and a representation of coastal economic development of the coastal cities especially in the developing countries. In our country, most coastal cities have brought or are bringing it into overall city planning.However, the urban coastal zone is a very complicated ecotone and accordingly its planning is very difficult. In particular, the coastal spatial planning of coastal cities is short of planning theories and approaches. This dissertation discussed the urban coastal zone planning systemically, including principles of planning, planning practice, planning methodology, etc.First of all, this study examined the evolution of economic development of worldwide urban coastal zone. In term of the urbanization level or industrialization level of the cities, we divided most coastal cities in the world into three basic categories: industrial cities, post-industrial cities and new-industrial city, and examined and compared their social and economic characteristics, accordingly summarized the development evolution of the worldwide coastal cities. We drew several conclusions, as follows: firstly, with raising the level of urban development, the development characteristics of the urban coastal zone were shifting from production biased to consumption biased; secondly, the spatial separation between big seaports and big coastal cities is occurring; thirdly, in the near future the producing-type industry and consuming-type industry will coexist in the urban coastal zone, and at a specified future date the urban coastal zone will play a consumption-biased role; etc.Considering planning principles of Urban planning and Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), and the characteristics of urban coastal zone, this research discussed simply a series of planning principles of the urban coastal zoneplanning, such as some planning viewpoints, planning principia, basic analysis issues and key planning issues, etc.In the practical research, this dissertation studied in detail the urban coastal zone planning in Xiamen and pays most attention to studying on spatial planning. Based on examining the characteristics of ecological environment and social-economic development in Xiamen, this study applied GIS technology and weighted factors overlaying technique to perform suitability analysis for different objectives, consequently put forward an innovative spatial planning project of urban coastal zone in Xiamen. The overall urban coastal zone in Xiamen was divided into ten functional areas. All functional areas were endued with their respective dominant functions and secondary functions in the near future (before 2015), dominant functions at a specified future date (after 2015), current environment protection objectives, and seawater quality objective before 2015.Finally, grounded on the foregoing study, this dissertation focused on how to develop the urban coastal zone planning of the booming coastal cities in our country. There were mainly two aspects of inclusions, as follows: first, several planning notions or approaches of urban coastal zone planning; second, a few pairs of relations, which should be dealt with well.