Tracking the scaling of urban open spaces in China from 1990 to 2020

Urban open spaces (UOS) are crucial for urban life, offering benefits across individual and societal levels. However, the understanding of the systematic dynamic of UOS scaling with city size and its potential non-linear performance remains a limited clarity area. This study bridges this gap by integrating urban scaling laws with remote sensing data from 1990 to 2020, creating a framework to analyze UOS trends in China. Our findings reveal that UOS growth is sub-linear scaling with city size, exhibiting economies of scale with scaling exponents between 0.55 and 0.65 and suggesting potential shortages. The distribution structure of UOS across cities is becoming increasingly balanced, as indicated by the rising Zipf's slope from 0.66 to 0.88. Southeastern coastal cities outperform, highlighting spatial variations and path dependency in UOS development. Additionally, using metrics of Scale-adjusted metropolitan indicator (SAMI) and the ratio of open space consumption to population growth rates (OCRPGR), we observe a trend towards more coordinated development between UOS and population, with a declining proportion of uncoordinated cities. Our long-term, large sample coverage study of UOS in China may offer positive significance for urban ecological planning and management in similar rapidly urbanizing countries, contributing to critical insights for quantifying and monitoring urban sustainable development.