Comprehensive study on ecological restoration and land exploitation of mining subsidence in suburbs of Chinese mining cities

China has nearly a hundred mining cities derived from mining development. While mining development has brought about immense achievements in a city’s economic construction, it has also resulted in different levels of damage to the eco-environment of the mining city, leaving behind a lot of subsided wasteland and heavily confining the sustainable development and transformation there. How to restore and exploit the land and eco-environment disrupted by mining development in an effective way, therefore, has become a pressing challenge that Chinese mining cities are facing. In this paper, the planning and construction of Nanhu Eco-city in the suburb of Tangshan City is analyzed as an example. After characterizing the coal-mining subsided lands in Kailuan Tangshan Mine originated in different periods and under different geological mining conditions and evaluating their safety level, the authors try to demonstrate how eco-restoration and comprehensive land exploitation should be implemented by making the best use of available local resources to achieve “economy-society-environment” sustainability and coexistence in a mining city. © 2014, The Author(s).