Rural industrial restructuring in China’s metropolitan suburbs: Evidence from the land use transition of rural enterprises in suburban Beijing

•We analyzed the land use transition of the rural enterprises in suburban Beijing by a rural enterprise index and explored the spatial-temporal characteristics of implied industrial restructuring driven by urban functional sprawl.•Land use transition of the rural enterprises has been observed in both the dominant and recessive land use morphology. Changes on the land use structure, land ownership and intensification of the production factors are main characteristics of this transition.•The rising values of rural enterprise index from the outer suburbs to the peri-urban areas indicate a rural industrial restructuring from the endogenous industrialization to exogenous industrialization. With an increasingly open market of collective construction land, Beijing’s suburban rural areas have been well integrated with the urban industries and functions spilling over from the central city.•The land use transition has released a strong policy demand for the system reform of the rural construction land in China’s metropolitan suburbs. China’s rural areas has witnessed a rapid and far-reaching transition in the past decades, following which thousands of “hollowed villages” in China’s traditional agricultural areas has mushroomed. While in the metropolitan suburbs, such a transition has led to the functional evolution and industrial restructuring of the rural settlements. Industrial upgrading and land intensive use in the urban areas, coupled with the tightening construction land quotas, has affected the land use morphology of the suburban rural settlements directly and/or indirectly. This paper explores the rural industrial restructuring by evaluating the land use transition of the rural enterprises in suburban Beijing. Based on the spatial land use data and field work, a clear spatial differentiation of the land use morphology has been found in the study area, which involves not only the dominant morphology like land use structure, but also the recessive morphology like the land ownership and intensification of the production factors. Then, a rural enterprise index which combines three main changes on the land use morphology was developed to demonstrate the spatial combination characteristics of the rural enterprises. The results indicate that with an increasingly open market of collective construction land, Beijing’s suburban rural areas have been well integrated with the urban industries and functions spilling over from the central city. This is considered as a pro