Assessing industrial land-use efficiency at parcel scale: Actual vs. expected economic outputs across diverse parcel types and spatial conditions

As urban development shifts toward the optimization of existing built-up areas, identifying inefficient industrial land is increasingly important for targeted land renewal and stock-oriented land governance. Although industrial land-use efficiency (ILUE) has been widely assessed at industrial-park and administrative scales, large-area parcel-scale evaluation remains constrained by limited fine-grained land use information and parcel-scale economic data. To address these limitations, this study develops a parcel-scale ILUE evaluation method by comparing actual economic output (AEO) with expected economic output (EEO), which refers to the reasonably expected output of a parcel given its functional type and spatial conditions. Firstly, using multisource spatiotemporal data, 13,510 industrial parcels in Beijing are classified into four functional types, i.e., technology office, commercial service, manufacturing, and warehouse & logistics, and characterized by built, socio-economic, and ecological conditions. Then, parcel-scale AEO is estimated by integrating gridded economic information with administrative industrial statistics, while EEO is estimated using cyclic random forest regression (CRF-R) to capture nonlinear spatial condition–output relationships. Our results reveal 3684 inefficient parcels, primarily concentrated in southern and eastern peri-urban districts. Compared with observed business revenue and documented renewal projects, the downscaled AEO better captures parcel-scale economic variation, while the inefficient parcels identified using CRF-R achieved a 76.7% project-level spatial correspondence rate. Based on feature importance analysis, the study gives type-specific governance recommendations, including improving transit accessibility for office and commercial land, supplementing residential and public service for manufacturing land, and increasing development intensity and road accessibility for logistics-oriented parcels, thereby providing a practical diagnostic tool for differentiated industrial land renewal.