Underload and overload communities: Revealing the conflicts between population distribution and carrying capacity at an inner-city community scale

The mismatch between population distribution and carrying capacity of the local living environment is an essential cause of the human-living environment conflict, threatening sustainable city development. Previous studies mostly focused on population density at coarse scales, e.g., national, regional, or city, but ignore carrying capacity at the inner-city scale, namely community scale hereafter. Accordingly, we define community carrying capacity of population (CCCP) as a reference to extract underload and overload communities to represent unsustainable development modes. We firstly establish an indicator system to measure living environments of diverse communities considering natural, built, and socioeconomic environments, based on which we then propose a cyclic random forest to measure the heterogeneous CCCPs of 1,335 communities in Beijing, and finally the CCCPs are compared to the actual population distribution for extracting underload and overload communities. The experimental results find 261 underload, 332 overload, and 742 well-balanced communities. The findings suggest to consider the main controlling factors of carrying capacities in diverse communities to improve the CCCPs of overload communities and restrict the further development of underload communities for reducing human-living environment conflicts. This research is a pioneer to consider CCCP for evaluating population loads and helps explore the inequality at the inner-city scale, which contributes to fine-scale land use policies for facilitating sustainable cities and communities.