Abstract
Mega-sports events have a profound impact on promoting the urbanization process, optimizing the urban spatial structure, and improving the competitiveness of the host city. Taking the 19th Asian Games Hangzhou 2022 (AGH) as an example, we used remote sensing data and a scenario-based model to simulate land-use changes and developments from 2005 to 2025. By setting two scenarios, natural development and AGH-driven development, we explored the impact of AGH on urban development and its driving factors. The results show that (1) cultivated land areas decreased by 369.96 km2, while construction land areas increased by 488.33 km2 among the main land-use types in Hangzhou from 2005 to 2020. Urban areas quickly expanded with the West Lake as the center. (2) Urban sprawl intensity under the AGH-driven scenario is expected to increase by 0.91% compared to in the natural-development scenario, indicating that hosting AGH would accelerate the expansion of urban land, particularly in districts set with sports venues such as Binjiang, Xiaoshan, and Yuhang. The strategic trend of supporting the Qiantang River is obvious. (3) Under the influence of AGH, the centroid of urban construction land shifted towards the southeast, and the spatial direction was remarkable. The construction of venues and supporting facilities, and construction land for public rail transit, are the main direct driving forces of urban expansion. The AGH enhances the pace of urbanization, significantly altering the urban spatial structure and helping the city achieve a major transition from the West Lake Era to the Qiantang River Era. Furthermore, our research can provide insights into other cities that will host mega-sports events.
Highlights
With the development of society and the economy, urbanization is an inevitable trend and a hot research topic
The city center is dominated by construction land; most of the eastern and northeastern regions are cultivated land, while the southern and western regions are forestland; Qiantang River passes through the city from northeast to southwest and flows through central built-up areas
As a result, cultivated-land area decreased from 2333.54 km2 to 1963.58 km2, while construction land are most obvious through the whole ground-feature change process, with cultivated land constantly decreasing and construction land increasing
Summary
With the development of society and the economy, urbanization is an inevitable trend and a hot research topic. The simulation of land-use changes and related urban spatial patterns by setting different scenarios is an effective means to explore the process of urban development, providing insights into better adjusting and optimizing urban planning, and helping cities to achieve their future urban construction goals. In the past few decades, domestic and foreign researchers created many different mathematical models to simulate and predict future land-use development, such as the system dynamic model [3,4], Markov chain model [5], cellular-automata (CA) model [6], Sustainability 2021, 13, 1649. CLUE is widely adopted to simulate urban sprawl, land-use/-cover changes, and food safety applications.
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