Understanding the Dynamic Mechanism of Urban Land Use and Population Distribution Evolution from a Microscopic Perspective

Abstract

With the advancement of urbanization, the contradiction in the man–land relationship becomes more and more difficult to ignore. Investigation of the change in urban land use, population distribution and its mechanism can provide powerful assistance for urban planning. Since the changes in urban land use and population distribution is a complex process with spatial heterogeneity, the current methods for describing them are still lacking in both interpretability and spatial differences. In this paper, we combine the expansion phenomena of urban land use and population distribution with the heat equation to understand the mechanism. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to identify the diffusion coefficient to obtain the diffusion law in the city’s development. In this way, the diffusion coefficient identified from the data is directly associated with urban changes. The mechanism of changes in urban land use and population distribution can be explained with the diffusion equation and the diffusion coefficient. Our model is first validated on land use and land cover data, followed by further refinement of the spatial differences in the artificial impervious surface data. The experiment’s results imply that by applying the model to the population data, the model’s generalization ability has been significantly improved.