Abstract
Dongguan has experienced the most rapid urbanization since the Chinese reform and opening policy. To analyze the urban expansion in this city, in this study, 12 land use/land cover maps were produced using a multiple classifiers system on the Google Earth Engine platform. A long time-series land use dataset from 1987 to 2020, was achieved. The results indicate that, during the past 33 years, the urban area increased by 13.84 times and reached 1483.06 km <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> in 2020, whereas cultivated land and forest continually decreased because of rapid urbanization. By analyzing the changes in urban forms and landscape indexes, Dongguan experienced a diffusion–coalescence–diffusion phase, and its urban expansion can be divided into three stages: The early-age urbanization stage (1987–1996), the rapid urbanization stage (1996–2011), and the intensive urbanization stage (2011–2020). The development of the economic and dual-level administration of Dongguan expanded the urban area surrounding the towns and traffic corridors, and, finally, formed a connected urban area. The urban expansion, just like sparking spots firing the prairie, is special and conforms to a Dongguan urbanization pattern.
Highlights
U RBAN constitutes the most concentrated area of human activity, and it is the home of over half of humans
The automatically estimated land use/land cover (LULC) results were post-processed through manual interpretation
The urbanisation process was based in many towns, followed by the simultaneous expansion around the towns and traffic corridors, forming an urban land connectivity distribution in a large area. This dynamic spatio-temporal urbanisation pattern was similar to sparkling spots in a prairie, and the development was similar to a seafire, with the towns looking like sparkling spots
Summary
U RBAN constitutes the most concentrated area of human activity, and it is the home of over half of humans. Urbanisation refers to the population shift from rural to urban areas, and it is a phenomenon that links many disciplines, including economic development, industrialisation, modernisation, urban planning, and policy [1,2,3]. The places that experienced urbanisation became the most dramatic land use/land cover (LULC)-changed areas globally [4,5]. Urbanisation is a long-term continuous process that improves socio-economic development and quality of life [5,6]. It causes serious problems, such as biodiversity damage, water pollution, urban heat islands, and other environmental. Urbanisation studies have become a research hotspot in different fields [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
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