Analysis of process and exploration of mode for rural urbanization based on remote sensing and GIS

Abstract

As Nobel economics laureate Stiglitz predicted that China's rapid urbanization which started in twentieth Century 80 has taken a great influence on the process of global human society. In the past 10a, China has experienced the largest urbanization process in the world. Meanwhile, under the guidance of a series of agricultural policy, Chinese rural settlements have dramatically changed on spatial distribution and shape. As large rural population, the rural residential areas still are mainly living form for the agricultural laborers in the future for a long time in China. In order to encourage the coordinated development of regional economy, Chinese government has put forward in the New-type Urbanization promulgated (2014-2020) in March 2014. The New-type urbanization is a major way to solve three-dimensional rural issues and to promote the coordinated development of regional in Chinese rural area. The study area is located in the middle of Hexi Corridor in Gansu province of China (east longitude 100°6'~100°52', latitude 38°39'~39°24'), with the total area of 3.66×103km2and the population up to 18.95×104in 2011. In the recent 10a with the rapid expansion of the urban boundary, a large number of cultivated lands around the borough were occupied. In the pastoral interior, so many rural settlements were built and expanded which cause a series of ecological and environmental problems. Considering the above reasons, in order to profoundly understanding the process stage of rural urbanization and the factors of farmers willingness to participate rural urbanization and to explore the suitable model of rural urbanization, this thesis uses the Ganzhou district in Zhangye city, Gansu province as an example, combined with temporal and spatial changes of rural residents as well as the farmers' urbanization willingness survey, to analysis the factors of rural urbanization and to explore rural urbanization possible mode in future. Therefore, this paper first extracts the spatial distribution information of rural urbanization based on the Landsat TM/OLI in 1990, 2004, 2014 images in Ganzhou District, and then uses GIS spatial analysis and statistical methods to analyze variation law and reveal the process and characteristics of rural residential in Ganzhou District. Later, we applied Logistic regression method to explore the factors base on the wishes of farmers. Finally we construct the urbanization pattern of Ganzhou district based on the above results. The main results of the study were as follows: 1) from 1990 to 2014, the number and area of rural residential Ganzhou district continues increasing, especially in the latest 10 years the rural residential area was significantly larger than 15 years ago, and the spatial agglomeration effect is obvious. From this result, we can infer that the urbanization process has accelerated significantly for nearly 10 years in the study area, and the process has a significant difference in space. According to the different stages of urbanization in Ganzhou district, we divided into 3 stages including mature period, growth period and incubation period; 2) Logistic regression found that the main factors affecting farmers to take part in urbanization as follows: new skills training education, farmer's age, the number of family to migrant workers, the choice of hospital, per capital arable land, whether to support the land exchange. The primary factor of peasant household willingness to participate in new-type urbanization is concerns of survival skill after urbanization. The additional factors include their characteristics and status of rural health, such as the farmers' age, education etc. Another important factor is the new land policy factors related to new-tape urbanization. The seven factors were classified into non-agricultural skill type, combination agricultural and industrial type and agricultural dominant; 3) According to the different urbanization stages and types of farmer urbanization, we constructed various models of rural urbanization to match with the land exchange model and rural livelihood model. This study specified the process of rural urbanization and provided the theory basis and the practice instruction for scientific and reasonable rural urbanization policymaking. ©, 2015, Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering. All right reserved.