Spatio-temporal change of landuse pattern of rural settlements in developed area: A case study of Huishan distirict in Wuxi city

Abstract

As the basic carrier for economic activities in the rural areas, rural settlements have attracts much academic attention all the time in the rural geography. From the perspective of spatial morphology and function, integrating land use data, remote sensing image and rural investigation material, this paper aims to analyze the spatio-temporal variation of morphology and function of rural settlements in Huishan district of Wuxi city based on spatial analysis methods such as ANN index, kernel density and growth intensity index. Later, the evolutionary mechanism and optimizing patterns are discussed. The empirical analysis indicates that after1980 the total area of rural residential land increased by 95%, and the rural residential land growth index changed in an opposite "U" shape, first increased quickly, later decreased slowly,but spatial agglomeration was kept completely. Industrial and commercial land has become the most important element of residential land growth in Huishan district, and has made residential land more diversified and integrated. In the industry and tourism village, the new added residential land expanded in the area outside the old ones, which is featured by diversity and multifunction, and the spatial morphology of settlement become more regular. On the contrary,in the agriculture village, settlements expanded very slowly, residential land kept the dominant position in the settlements, and the morphology of settlement was still irregular. After the year1980, policy reforms promoted the village multifunction and made village's function different from each other. Respectively, in corresponding to three economic and land development types(industrial town mode, tourism town mode and flexible agglomeration mode) could be applied to optimize the spatial morphology of settlements in the rural areas.