Exploring Divergent Patterns and Dynamics of Urban and Active Rural Developments—A Case Study of Dezhou City

Abstract

Clarifying urban-rural spatial explicit structure changes is of great significance for understanding the urban-rural relationship evolution. Previous studies have mostly focused on urban internal spatial structure evolutions and less on the regional scale when it comes to exploring urban and rural evolutions. Nighttime light can timely reflect the human activities in regions and provides great potential for investigating the evolutions of urban and rural spatial explicit structures. Here, taking Dezhou City, a rapidly urbanizing city in China, as a case study, we employed the local contour tree method and nighttime light data to map urban and active rural extents from 2012 to 2020 and further explored their respective development processes. This study showed that unlike in rural regions, the internally explicit structures of urban regions were more complex, and there were often multiple hotspots inside them. The area of the urban-rural region increased significantly by 39.3% from 2012 to 2020 (p < 0.05). Populations were greatly responsible for the spatial explicit structure changes of urban and active rural regions. The urban and rural region rankings of the identified counties were basically consistent with the urban and rural population rankings. Unlike the perspectives of earlier land use (i.e., built-up land or impervious surface), this study underlined urban and active rural regions in view of the scope of active human activities. These results can likely help policymakers understand current active human activity extents and provide a data-based reference for future public services and infrastructure planning.