Can Green Infrastructure Curb Urban Sprawl? Evidence from China's Sponge City Program and Spatial Implications for Emerging Asia

Yangchun Cao, Yating Tian, Qi Zhang , Jing Zhang

Motivated by the global challenges of unsustainable urban expansion and climate vulnerability, China implemented the Sponge City Program (SCP) as a large-scale nature-based intervention. Moving beyond its conventional framing as a purely hydraulic tool, this study re-evaluates the SCP as a catalyst for spatial governance. Utilizing a Double Machine Learning (DML) approach on spatial data from 279 Chinese cities (2011–2023), we examine the policy's capacity to curb inefficient urban sprawl (US). The results reveal that the SCP significantly restrains sprawl through enhanced energy efficiency, expanded green infrastructure, and increased urban polycentricity, particularly in central and non-resource-based cities. Ultimately, this study provides a globally transferable "double dividend" paradigm for emerging economies, demonstrating how green infrastructure investments can serve as proactive spatial governance instruments to steer sustainable urban morphologies.