Quantifying Urban Sprawl and Its Driving Forces in China

Abstract

Against the background that urbanization has proceeded quickly in China over the last two decades, a limited number of empirical researches have been performed for analyzing the measurement and driving forces of urban sprawl at the national and regional level. The article aims at using remote sensing derived data and administrative data (for statistical purposes) to investigate the development status of urban sprawl together with its driving forces. Compared with existing studies, NPP/VIIRS data and LandScan data were used here to examine urban sprawl from two different perspectives: urban population sprawl and urban land sprawl. Furthermore, we used population density as a counter-indicator of urban sprawl, and the regression results also prove the superiority of the urban sprawl designed by us. The main results show that the intensity of urban population sprawl and urban land sprawl has been enhanced. However, the upside-down between the inflow of migrants and the supply of urban construction land among different regions aggravates the intensity of urban sprawl. According to the regression analyses, the driving mechanism of urban sprawl in the eastern region relying on land finance and financial development has lost momentum for the limitation of urban construction land supply. The continuous outflow of population and loosely land supply have accelerated the intensity of urban land sprawl in the central and western regions. The findings of the article may help people to realize that urban sprawl has become a staggering reality among Chinese cities; thereby urban planners as well as policymakers should make some actions to hinder the urban sprawl.