Quantifying Urban Sprawl and Its Driving Forces in China

Abstract

Against the background that urbanization has proceeded quickly in China over the last two decades, a limited number of empirical researches have been performed for analyzing the measurement and driving forces of urban sprawl at the national and regional level. The article aims at using remote sensing derived data and administrative data (for statistical purposes) to investigate the development status of urban sprawl together with its driving forces. Compared with existing studies, NPP/VIIRS data and LandScan data were used here to examine urban sprawl from two different perspectives: urban population sprawl and urban land sprawl. Furthermore, we used population density as a counter-indicator of urban sprawl, and the regression results also prove the superiority of the urban sprawl designed by us. The main results show that the intensity of urban population sprawl and urban land sprawl has been enhanced. However, the upside-down between the inflow of migrants and the supply of urban construction land among different regions aggravates the intensity of urban sprawl. According to the regression analyses, the driving mechanism of urban sprawl in the eastern region relying on land finance and financial development has lost momentum for the limitation of urban construction land supply. The continuous outflow of population and loosely land supply have accelerated the intensity of urban land sprawl in the central and western regions. The findings of the article may help people to realize that urban sprawl has become a staggering reality among Chinese cities; thereby urban planners as well as policymakers should make some actions to hinder the urban sprawl.

Urban Green Infrastructure and Sustainable Development: A Review

“…The outstanding number of documents corresponding to three countries, the USA with 82.66% of its population living in urban areas in 2019 [65], China, where urban sprawl is now a major issue of research interest and development concern [66], and Europe with a long history of urban development, indicates the interest of researchers in these countries to contribute to improving conditions where UGI and SD presented higher deficiencies. Then, it is recommended to increase the collaboration among authors from different countries and continents in the future.…”

Dynamic Expansion of Urban Land in China’s Coastal Zone since 2000

“…Time series land use data, and multi-temporal analysis methods combined with indictors representing urban expansion patterns and types can effectively reflect the dynamic process of urbanization in terms of urban land [17][18][19][20][21]49]. A large number of studies have considered the spatial and temporal characteristics of urban expansion in typical cities or urban agglomerations of China based on remote sensing techniques [16,20,22,23,25,[30][31][32]34,50], which have demonstrated that China's urban expansion has significant regional difference. However, studies on typical cities, such as provincial capitals [30] or urban agglomerations [50], might ignore the characteristics of small cities or cities not radiated by urban agglomerations; thus, it is necessary to conduct a comprehen-…”

“…Time series land use data, and multi-temporal analysis methods combined with indictors representing urban expansion patterns and types can effectively reflect the dynamic process of urbanization in terms of urban land [17][18][19][20][21]49]. A large number of studies have considered the spatial and temporal characteristics of urban expansion in typical cities or urban agglomerations of China based on remote sensing techniques [16,20,22,23,25,[30][31][32]34,50], which have demonstrated that China's urban expansion has significant regional difference. However, studies on typical cities, such as provincial capitals [30] or urban agglomerations [50], might ignore the characteristics of small cities or cities not radiated by urban agglomerations; thus, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive analysis for a wide range of regions with cities of different sizes.…”

“…Currently, with advances in remote sensing technologies and methods, many regional and global LUCC maps or urban distribution maps have been produced [17][18][19], such as LandScan, the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) and GlobeLand30. These products provide useful information on urban extent for monitoring the spatial characteristics and dynamic changes of urban land, and numerous studies have been performed to analyze urban expansion at regional, national or global scales [20,21].…”

The driving forces of changes in land use of a Peri-urban area: The case of Tselinograd district, Kazakhstan

“…Thus, LULC is the result of human interaction with the environment, which is affected by changes in socio-economic processes. By assessing changes in the long-term structure of LULC and by focusing on the main processes, it is possible to determine the drivers of these phenomena and take effective measures for the sustainable development of the Area of Interest (AOI) [11,12].…”