Land use pattern evolution and its driving mechanism of an ancient town under the background of tourism urbanization:A case study of Zhouzhuang

Abstract

Under the background of tourism urbanization, the urbanization of land use of the ancient town is an important scientific problem, especially the evolution and driving mechanism of land use pattern. Combined with the methods of high-resolution remote sensing images, spatial analysis of GIS and the field research, the study selects Zhouzhuang as the typical case of the ancient town and analyzes the evolution and its driving mechanism of land use pattern from 2002 to 2012. The results are obtained as follows.(1) The amount of land transfer is increasing obviously in the ten years. It is the rapid development of urbanization and the transformation and upgrade of the tourism industry that promote the transformation progress, i.e. from the land use of agriculture and forestry into the construction land use of tourism and public services, etc.(2) Apart from the land use of agriculture and forestry as well as water area, the dynamic degree of other types of land use is positive value. Meanwhile, the dynamic degree of the land use of tourism, public management, public services land and industrial land are gradually increasing.(3) The land use types of ancient town, which are mainly for tourism, displays the change trend of expanding gradually to the periphery from the core of the scenic spots of the ancient town. In addition, the structure of land use shows the mode of "concentric circles plus the shape of fan".(4) The space conversion of land use pattern is caused by the internal and external driving forces, such as the limitation of natural geographical environment, the government behavior and policy guidance, the economic development and industrial transformation, the change of social production mode. Therefore,the effective way should be constructed by the tourism development, the fusion of industry and town, the government regulation and the market guidance based on the advantage of cultural resource of itself so as to promote the quality of urbanization. Finally, the efficient use and intensive development of the land resource of the ancient town can be realized.