Abstract
As the largest developing country, China has experienced dramatic urban expansion since the “reform and opening-up” policy started at the end of the 1970s. In this paper, we monitor three decades of urban expansion in China’s 36 major cities, based on the spectral mixture analysis of remotely sensed satellite images. The results demonstrated that these major cities have expanded by 5.85 times from 1986 to 2015, with 15.51 km2 average expansion area per city per year. We found the urban expansion trajectories showed three different modes, i.e., exponential, linear and s-shaped, which were closely related to the city development level. In the old city zones, however, there was an interesting common tendency of the impervious surface area (ISA) first increasing and then decreasing, which could be largely attributed to the phenomenon of urban village reconstruction in China’s cities. Based on the Granger Causality Test (GCT), the interaction between urban ISA and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita (GDPPC) suggested that the former was the driver of the latter. Meanwhile, taking the Yangtze River as the division between north and south China, there exists a north–south territorial differentiation for the interaction between ISA and total population at the year-end (TP).
Highlights
Urbanization can be expressed as a shift of population from rural to urban areas, predominantly resulting in a transformation from rural land to urban land [1,2,3,4]
The urban areas of America [21,22,23], Asia [24,25,26], Europe [27,28,29], and Africa [30,31] have been carefully discussed by satellite data. Those large-scale research studies have provided a macroscopic description of urban extent, inspiring us to explore the dynamics of urban expansion and the interaction between urban area and the environment
To interpret the driving mechanisms for urbanization, we explored the potential cause and effect between the factors and urban impervious surface area (ISA) changes with the assistance of the Granger Causality Test (GCT)
Summary
Urbanization can be expressed as a shift of population from rural to urban areas, predominantly resulting in a transformation from rural land to urban land [1,2,3,4]. The urban areas of America [21,22,23], Asia [24,25,26], Europe [27,28,29], and Africa [30,31] have been carefully discussed by satellite data. Those large-scale research studies have provided a macroscopic description of urban extent, inspiring us to explore the dynamics of urban expansion and the interaction between urban area and the environment. A more specific and typical area is in need for more refined research
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