Youth Forum on Territorial Space
JIAO Lin-shen, ZHANG Min, QIN Xiao, KONG Yu
To figure out the number and pattern of the vacant houses is essential for spatial planning and city examination & evaluation. However, the limitation of fine data and methods has been a big barrier to accurately identifying and revealing the dynamic pattern of vacant houses. This paper developed a computational model to identify the vacant houses and to calculate the residential housing vacancy rate (HVR) based on the monthly electricity consumption data from all the households in X county in 2019. The results showed that: (1) The HVR of X county was 21.64%, and 33.81% of households had been vacant in 2019. Meanwhile, the rate of the households that were vacant in Chinese New Year's Eve and had been vacant all the year was 19.97% and 11.45%, respectively. (2) The monthly HVR fluctuated regularly, with February, August at the bottom, and May and November at the peak. However, the HVR of February when China's traditional Spring Festival fell did not decline as much as we expected. (3) The village HVR had spatial autocorrelation attribute and the urban built-up areas were the hotspots which deserve more attention. (4) Being vacant all the year is the top one model among 1931 vacant types. The paper held the view that the mechanism of the vacant in X county is (1) the change of the form of population migration and mobility; (2) housing filtering which occurred in rural families, and (3) over "housing urbanization" in the urban built-up areas. We argue that identifying and sensing vacant houses are fundamental works in spatial planning. Meanwhile, spatial planning should react properly to the rural vacant houses and transform the goal from the expansion of land to rising the wellbeing of people. We need to pay much attention to the vacant houses in the city because it is a signal of the mistake in planning. The vacant identifying computational model and the research result are helpful to advance housing vacancy study, which is significant for spatial planning.