Comparative Estimation of Urban Development in China’s Cities Using Socioeconomic and DMSP/OLS Night Light Data

Junfu Fan,Yuke Zhou,Tao Xu,Ting Ma,Chenghu Zhou

doi:10.3390/rs6087840

Abstract

China has been undergoing a remarkably rapid urbanization process in the last several decades. Urbanization is a complicated phenomenon involving imbalanced transformation processes, such as population migrations, economic advancements and human activity dynamics. It is important to evaluate the imbalances between transformation processes to support policy making in the realms of environmental management and urban planning. The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) nighttime lights time series imagery provides a consistent and timely measure to estimate socioeconomic dynamics and changes in human activity. In this study, we jointly compared the annual ranks of three variables: the population, the gross domestic product (GDP) and the sum of weighted DMSP/OLS nighttime lights to estimate spatial and temporal imbalances in the urbanization processes of 226 cities in China between 1994 and 2011. We used ternary plots and a Euclidean distance-based method to quantitatively estimate the spatial and temporal imbalances between cities and to classify diverse urban development patterns in China. Our results suggest that, from 1994 to 2011, the imbalances of urbanization processes observed in the eastern, western and middle cities decreased, respectively, by 35.26%, 29.04% and 25.84%; however, imbalances in the northeast increased by 33.29%. The average decrement in imbalances across all urbanization processes in the 226 cities was 17.58%. Cities in the eastern region displayed relatively strong attractions to population, more rapid economic development processes and lower imbalances between socioeconomic and anthropogenic dynamics than cities in other regions. Several types of urban development patterns can be identified by comparing the morphological characteristics of temporal ternary plots of the 226 cities in China. More than one third (35.40%) of the 226 cities presented balanced states during the period studied; however, the remainder showed alternative urban development patterns.

Highlights

At present, approximately 0.5% of the Earth’s land surface is composed of urban areas [1], accounting for approximately 52.1% of the global population [2]
The disparities between the three parameters of a city—population, gross domestic product (GDP) and the sum of nighttime lights—indicate an imbalanced urbanization process, which can be represented on the ternary diagrams using the distance factor
China has been undergoing a rapid urbanization accompanied by different patterns of transformation processes in the last several decades

Summary

Introduction

Approximately 0.5% of the Earth’s land surface is composed of urban areas [1], accounting for approximately 52.1% of the global population [2]. Urban areas are hot spots that lead to environmental changes at multiple scales [9], and urbanization poses both challenges and opportunities for sustainable development and environmental management [10]. The velocity or frequency of such dynamics exhibits human activity intensities in urban areas, such as energy consumption, infrastructure construction and socioeconomic activity [11]. Cities with similar population and socioeconomic parameter scales (e.g., gross domestic product, or GDP; income) should represent approximately equal intensities of human activity. The three indicators could be imbalanced, which would lead to spatial and temporal disparities between cities distributed at a large scale, as they are in China [12]. The balance between population, socioeconomic parameters and human activity may affect policy making for cities’

Objectives

Results

Conclusion