Despite the growing attention on uncontrolled and unprofitable urban sprawling in many African countries, few pragmatic solutions have been raised or effectively implemented. While uncontrolled and unprofitable urban expansions happened primarily due to poor land use management and dysfunctional land market, the cost of land management enforcement and reform is high. This paper suggests that the recently re-emerging special economic zones (SEZs) in Africa could be a practical way of using government intervention to reduce uncontrolled urban expansion and optimize urban land use.

A rapid increase in population in sub-Saharan Africa has caused a decrease in farm size, an increase in the number of landless farmers, and soil erosion in communal forests due to increasing utilization. Ethiopia has addressed this problem by introducing an epoch-making privatization policy for the allocation of communal land to landless farmers. This policy promotes the economic utilization of the communal land while protecting natural resources. Hitherto, few studies have evaluated the impact of the policy.

Reasonable evaluation of the intensive urban land use has emerged as an important issue and hot topic for urban development. This paper aims to construct a unified framework for evaluating the intensive use of urban land and analyzing its influence channels. It combines the advantages of the approach of the indicator system and that of efficiency measurement, and provides an empirical test to apply this analytical framework using the panel data of 38 districts and counties in Chongqing, China, ranging from 2009 to 2018.