Impact of Urbanization on the Spatial Sustainability of A City - A Case Study of Yantai

Abstract

Urbanization is a major factor that shapes the pattern of urban area of cities and exerts influence on cities’ development. The pattern of urban expansion and sprawl is considered as the main feature for evaluating the development of a city, which can dramatically reflect the path of urbanization and largely influence the potential of sustainability of a city. The objectives of this study were to introduce a sustainable development indicator - compact coefficient of urban area (CCUA), specially designed for evaluating the sustainability of a city in spatial dimension, and reveal the impact of urbanization on the sustainability of a city through comparing the trend of urbanization rate of a city with its changes of CCUA. A case study has been taken in Yantai, a medium-sized city in east part of China. Remote sensing was used for mapping the land use/land cover changes of urban area in Yantai from 1990 to 2010 by using the medium-resolution satellite imagery. Then, five indexes of ecological landscape were selected and processed, and CCUA of Yantai was calculated. Results of this study indicate that CCUA is an efficient indicator for measuring the sustainability of the pattern of urban expansion, which can assist the urban planning process of professionals and facilitate the decision-making process of local government.