Spatial Expansion of Urban/Town in Fuqing and Its Driving Force Analysis

Abstract

Fuqing is one of the cities in the coastal zonal areas of Fujian province, showing the fastest economic growth. The rapid economic development, especially in the 1990s, has resulted in the change of economic structure of Fuqing from agriculture dominant to industry dominant. With this significant economic shift, the area of urban/town land use has also increased. In essence, urban expansion in which non\|urban land use changes to urban land use is one aspect of urbanization. To reveal the actual change of this land use type, remote sensing technology was employed, which extracted the urban/town land use information from two Landsat TM images of 1991 and 1996, respectively. The study indicates that the urban/town land use of Fuqing has grown by 16.17 km\+2 during the five years, 1.2 times more than its original area in 1991. Obviously, the value of urban/town expansion is an important index, which is valuable for the assessment of urbanization. The achieved spatial data of urban/town expansion were integrated with the socio\|economic data through a GIS. This finally reveals that the driving forces to the urban/town land use expansion in Fuqing were the rapid industry development during the period.