Evaluation of Land Comprehensive Carrying Capacity and Spatio-Temporal Analysis of the Harbin-Changchun Urban Agglomeration

Land comprehensive carrying capacity (LCCC) reflects the limits of urban development that the land ground in the spatial area can bear under the constraints of society, economy, resources, and environment. An accurate and objective evaluation of LCCC is of great significance to the rational planning of urban space. Using the entropy method to obtain the weights of evaluation indexes, this study constructed an index system composed of four subsystems, i.e., urban construction (UC), social economy (SE), industry development (ID), and urban ecology (UE). Furthermore, calculating the index of 11 cities for the Harbin-Changchun urban agglomeration (HCUA) to analyze the influence of LCCC from diverse dimensions for the period 2004–2015. Lastly, the spatial and temporal differentiation characteristics between the neighboring units of LCCC were visualized through global and local spatial analysis. The results infer some novel findings as follows. (1) The overall tendency of the LCCC of the HCUA has gradually increased over the time window with the coordination of each subsystem. The urban ecological subsystem shows the highest rate of contribution and the social economy subsystem has the largest increase. Urban construction and industry development have a lower number of hot spot cities and lower clustering characteristics than social economy and urban ecology. (2) The core cities of the HCUA, Changchun and Harbin, demonstrate the reverse trend from 2010 to 2015, which reveals the states of excellent and good carrying capacity, respectively. In contrast, four cities are at the inferior state, and three cities are poor. Prioritizing the promotion of the industry development subsystem should be considered for these seven cities. (3) There is some spatial variation of LCCC in the HCUA, which shows the characteristic of “gradually decreasing from the core city to the surrounding area”. Changchun and Jilin are high–high clustering areas that drive Siping from a cold spot to a hot spot. Focusing on the development of secondary growth pole cities, Jilin and Songyuan are forming complementary and mutual reinforcement with the core cities, which has a positive significance in promoting the sustainable development of the regional space of urban agglomeration.