Urbanization and administrative restructuring: A case study on the Wuhan urban agglomeration

Abstract

a b s t r a c tUrbanization in China has been closely associated with urban sprawl, rural migration and the role of government has been more direct and powerful in setting it in motion. In 2014, the New Urbanization Planning in China has been released in which the development of urban agglomeration and smallmedium cities has been highlighted. In this context, we decompose urbanization into populationoriented and land-centered archetypes and devise spatial models in multiple strategies embedded with different spatial relations to unfold the underlying driving forces using Wuhan agglomeration as the case. In addition to the identification of major driving forces which are gross domestic product (GDP), income, fixed asset investment and the transportation construction, the major contributions of our study lie in the gauge on administrative influence, to be more specific, the status of urban district, city-level county and county, through incorporating different spatial weight matrix in different scenarios in spatial modeling. It found out that 1) both non-agricultural population and urban land exhibit significant spatial autocorrelation and the superiority in the city center is evident; 2) socio-economic development and transportation construction significantly influence urbanization whereas the personal income and fixed asset investment accounting for a large proportion being the most powerful factors; 3) different administrative status at the county level is an unneglectable factor and urban area has higher probability to expand when urban district is adjacent to county-level city; 4) the magnitude of this administrative status influence generally grows to a certain level and then reaches to a plateau. These findings provide theoretical basis for understanding the administrative dimension in new urbanization and have important policy implications on administrative adjustment and urban agglomeration.

Mapping the Changes in Urban Greenness Based on Localized Spatial Association Analysis under Temporal Context Using MODIS Data

“…Besides the well-developed ground transportation system, several subways have been constructed and are operational. Surrounded by many seaways, expressways, and railways, the city is practically one of the transportation hubs of China [41,42]. The well-developed urban infrastructure of the city has attracted a significant number of residents, including many students that graduated from universities, to settle down here after migrating from the nearby satellite cities as well as other cities across the country.…”

“…The vegetative areas are the most direct frontier that interacts with land exploitation. Therefore, the changes of vegetation space in the city has gained more consideration from the local government and urban planners than ever before [42]. Figure 1d Our interest was to explore the changes in urban greenness associated with the urbanization process, therefore a radius of 50 km centered at the urban center, referred to as the region of interest (ROI), including the downtown area, part of the suburban districts, and part of a few satellite cities around the megacity, was selected as the study region ( Figure 1c).…”

“…The vegetative areas are the most direct frontier that interacts with land exploitation. Therefore, the changes of vegetation space in the city has gained more consideration from the local government and urban planners than ever before [42]. Figure 1d illustrates the comparison of the annual maximum normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) between the years 2005 and 2015, revealing significant changes in the urban greenness during the period.…”

Assessing environmental impacts of urban growth using remote sensing

“…Land-use changes in Wuhan, China, in (Zeng et al 2015a) and (Sun et al 2016) revealed a general deterioration in vegetation cover and growth of impervious areas for the expansion of residential areas over most of the period from 1991 to 2013. In (Zeng, Zhang, and Xu 2016) some of the driving forces for the rapid urbanization in Wuhan have been listed as: urban sprawl; rural migration; socio-economic and transportation developments; and spatial interaction of counties that has been essential for realizing regional urbanization. In the study of changes in urbanization, change detection is often an essential task for decision-makers.…”

A Spatiotemporal Analysis of the Effects of Urbanization’s Socio-Economic Factors on Landscape Patterns Considering Operational Scales

“…The development of urbanization has always been an important issue in both ecological and socio-economic research [1][2][3][4][5][6]. The process of urbanization, which is intertwined with land cover transformation, has a direct and profound impact on changes in land use.…”