Identification and management of land use conflicts in mining cities: A case study of Shuozhou in China

While mining promotes rapid urban development, it also aggravates land use conflicts and threatens the sustainable development of mining cities. Land use conflict evaluation provides a basis for the coordination of different land use types. Therefore, this study adopted the multi-criteria evaluation method to evaluate the competitiveness of construction land, agricultural land and ecological land, then classified and combined competitiveness to identify 5 conflict intensities and 15 conflict types, and finally the spatial pattern of land use conflicts as a result was obtained to determine the focus of land management. The results showed that land use conflicts have intensified overall, and construction land and agricultural land conflicts were the main ones. On this basis, we proposed a synthetic model of land use conflict formation consisting of demand-driven, stakeholder behavior preferences and land use externalities. The study finally concluded by offering implication for land use policy that communication, government concerns, benefit distribution, control of illegal land conversion, effective implementation of policies should be used to alleviate land use conflicts.