The boundaries for 14 major cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou will be limited by the end of the year to prevent them from "blind expansion," an urban planning official said Wednesday.
Analysts believe that it will neither affect urban development nor affect regional economic integration.
In an interview with Guangdong-based Nandu Daily, Zhang Xiaoling, assistant to the president of the land survey and planning institute under the Ministry of Land and Resources, said that setting a boundary for urban development will be compulsory.
Dong Zuoji, director of the ministry's land planning department, said that the next step is to limit the expansion boundaries of over 600 cities across China. According to Zhang, the boundaries of emerging cities will change over time while strict limits will be imposed on large cities. Currently, many cities are expanding at a rapid rate especially by developing new districts and building big public squares.
The boundaries will take into consideration factors like city construction scale, land use plan and expansion scale, she added.
Dong said that the move is meant to accelerate the transformation of city development and promote the quality of urbanization to save land and protect farmland, and to protect the ecosystem.
"Setting a boundary for urban development aims to optimize urban land-use structures and promote their development in a rational way. Such physical boundaries will not hinder regional economic integration as it depends on industrial coordination and economic complementation between cities," Li Jingguo, a property research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
In response to public concerns over the rise in housing prices, Li said that if authorities consider factors like population growth, a city's resources and real estate development trend, it may not affect housing prices.
The report showed that from 2000 to 2010, the urban expansion rate reached 64.45 percent, 18.55 percent higher than the urban population growth rate in the same period.