Abstract
Urbanization in Central and Western China has attracted increasing attention in the advent of new-type urbanization in China and the age of 'Global Urbanism'. Although land urbanization is at the epicenter of Chinese urbanization, its process and driving forces in counties beyond the Eastern coastal areas are less known. This paper therefore seeks to investigate the spatial expansion and driving forces of land urbanization in Feixi county, a relatively advanced county neighboring Hefei city proper in Anhui province in Central China. Based on the land-use change survey data, remote sensing interpretation data, and statistical yearbook data of Feixi county from 2002 to 2016, it is revealed that the overall scale of urban land in Feixi county increased remarkably, though with obvious temporal and geographical variants. The year 2009 appears to be the cutting line between quantity-based land urbanization and quality-based land urbanization. Land urbanization rate is sensitive to both geographical distance and traffic accessibility to Hefei city proper. Driving forces of land urbanization in Feixi county are summarized as: (1) central city expansion, (2) government-led industrial park construction, and (3) large industrial projects along traffic corridors. A better understanding of urbanization in Feixi county cannot be fulfilled without taking into account the wider spatial process in Hefei city and the Yangtze River Delta city-region.
Highlights
The era of ‘Global Urbanism’ has been dawning since the onset of the 21st century, as a consistently increasing number of the world’s population settle in urban areas [1,2,3]
Li et al [33] point that multiple factors including socioeconomic, physical, proximity, accessibility, and neighborhood factors have driven urban expansion in China; Li et al [34] explored the spatiotemporal characteristics of Chinese urban expansion and adopted a geographically weighted regression (GWR) method to determine this spatial heterogeneity, The results revealed the spatial heterogeneity in the determinants of urban expansion, marketization was vital for urban expansion and had a stronger impact in the developed eastern and southern regions than in the less-developed
The results show that the fractal dimension index of urban land use form in Feixi county from 2002 to 2016 is fluctuating around 1.062 (Fig 2)
Summary
The era of ‘Global Urbanism’ has been dawning since the onset of the 21st century, as a consistently increasing number of the world’s population settle in urban areas [1,2,3]. Guided by the National New-type Urbanization Plan (2014–2020) as China’s first official plan on urbanization issued by the State Council in 2014, city-regionalization and urban-rural integration have been new avenues to sustain Chinese urbanization since the 2010s [24,25,26]. Detailed case studies on land urbanization in counties and towns in central and western China are by no means meaningless especially when it comes to the present transition towards a more ‘inclusive’ and spatially balanced new-type urbanization [24,26,28]. Zooming in on the spatial characters and driving forces of land urbanization in counties and towns in central and western China will offer updated evidence of novel trends in new-type urbanization, and yield valuable insights into divergent urban experience under different sub-national contexts for blooming ‘global urban studies’ [3].
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