Li Jiang
Research
Urbanization has extended its force to the surrounding rural territory over a surprisingly large landscape. The increasing interdependence between the city and the rural area in adjacency has made the latter being prominently absorbed as an organic part of the city. The urban influencing force stretch out so deeply that the undergoing process of “urban foot print” through which a city sustain itself becomes highly dynamic, creating conflicts that can threaten the livelihood and persistent thriving of the city. It is expected that more land and other resources associated with food production are required to accommodate the pervasive diet upgradation where urbanization and economic development play a great role. From the other side, urbanization, a process characterized by the continuous expansion of impervious surface is claimed to be the main cause of cropland encroachment, leading to a rapid declining of food producing capacity. This miserably massive loss of agricultural land is what is being witnessed across many regions in the developing world.
My interest broadly concerns loss of arable land and the rising problem of reducing grain production potential in regions that have been undergoing rapid urban transformation. In the study, the primary influential forces contributing to urban land expansion will be accessed and the major land use categories transferred as a sacrifice of arable land will be identified to get a better understanding of the underlying causes accounting for this landscape transformation. I am interested in building up a model with both explanatory capability and predictive power and one important output of the model will be a projection in the magnitude of future farmland disappearance and grain potential loss. Those estimates are with the capacity to concretize the stress casting on the local food sustaining system under an urbanizing setting.The originality of the research lies in the investigation of interrelationships among a wide range of components of interest. Studies in the past on the subject tend to be descriptive and most of them are substantially based on general facts at national or global scale, providing little information that can help quantify the relative strengths of distinct forces and their feedback mechanisms. The system dynamics approach provides an ideal platform for this research. It will allow me to incorporate information on different components influential to food demand and food production at regional level and then examine their internal links and dynamics.
