Spatiotemporal Characterization of the Urban Expansion Patterns in the Yangtze River Delta Region

Abstract

Characterizing urban expansion patterns is of great significance to planning and decision-making for urban agglomeration development. This study examined the urban expansion in the entire Yangtze River Delta Region (YRDR) with its land-use data of six years (1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2018). On the basis of traditional methods, we comprehensively considered the four aspects of urban agglomeration: expansion speed, expansion difference, expansion direction, and landscape pattern, as well as the interconnection of and difference in the expansion process between each city. The spatiotemporal heterogeneity of urban expansion development in this region was investigated by using the speed and differentiation indices of urban expansion, gravity center migration, landscape indices, and spatial autocorrelations. The results show that: (1) over the 23 years, the expansion of built-up land in the Yangtze River Delta Region was significant, (2) the rapidly expanding cities were mainly located along the Yangtze River and coastal areas, while the slowly expanding cities were mainly located in the inland areas, (3) the expansion direction of each city varied and the gravity center of the urban agglomeration moved toward the southwest, and (4) the spatial structure of the region became more clustered, the shape of built-up land turned simpler, and fragmentation decreased. This study unravels the spatiotemporal change of urban expansion patterns in this large urban agglomeration, and more importantly, can serve as a guide for formulating urban agglomeration development plans.

Spatiotemporal Characteristics and Heterogeneity of Vegetation Phenology in the Yangtze River Delta

“…Overall, the area of forest, grassland and build-up area show an increasing trend, and the largest increase in proportion of build-up area is about 58.3%. The rapid expansion of urban land is consistent with the research of [67]. The area of shrubland is the least, and the savanna increased and then decreased from 2001 to 2010, with the change being within 5%.…”

Precipitation Trends Analysis Using Gridded Dynamic Sampling Zones: Case Study Yangtze Delta Megalopolis

“…The Yangtze River Delta is one of the most developed regions in China. The growth rate of its economic and urban development is ahead of the national average (Yu et al, 2021). The "Development Plan for the Yangtze Delta Megalopolis" was issued by the Chinese central government as one of the national strategies in 2016, in order to strengthen the coordination and cooperation in cross-city/regional development and enhance the international competitiveness of Chinese cities.…”

“…The Yangtze River Delta (YRD) has experienced rapid urbanization in the past decades and has become one of the most developed regions in China, forming the world-renowned Yangtze Delta Megalopolis (YDM) (Fang, 2019;Yu et al, 2021). While rapid development brought prosperity to the YDM, it also caused drawbacks challenging its livability, such as foggy haze (Meng et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2020), heat waves (Huang et al, 2008;Huang and Lu, 2015), and heavy precipitation (Fu et al, 2017;Ding, 2018).…”

Land pressure evaluation in the Yangtze River Delta region: A perspective from production-living-ecology

“…For the continued existence of humans and for their ability to evolve, land serves as a crucial material foundation (Verburg et al, 2009;Jiang et al, 2022). People have increased from 2.6 billion in 1950 to 7.6 billion in 2021 as a result of increasing urbanization, and human activities are deteriorating the state of the land cover and ecological environments at an unprecedented rate, size, and spatial scale (Liu et al, 2014;Lazzarini et al, 2015;Nathaniel and Khan, 2020;Yu et al, 2021;Amponsah et al, 2022). The need to study and solve a variety of issues brought on by rising pressure on the land has been underlined (Zhu and He, 2010).…”