Comparison on Multi-Scale Urban Expansion Derived from Nightlight Imagery between China and India

Abstract

“The Dragon and the Elephant” between China and India is an important manifestation of global multipolarization in the 21st century. As engines of global economic growth, the two rising powers have followed similar courses of development but possess important differences in modes of development and urban development, which have attracted the widespread attention of scholars. From a geospatial perspective, and based on continuous annual night light data (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program-Operational Linescan System, DMSP-OLS) from 1992 to 2012, this paper conducts a multi-scale comparative analysis of urban development differences between China and India by employing various approaches such as the Gini coefficient, Getis–Ord Gi* index, and the Urban Expansion Intensity Index (UEII). The results show that: (1) The urban land space of the two countries expand rapidly, with the average annual expansion rate of China and India being 5.24% and 3.85%, respectively. The urban land expansion rate in China is 1.36 times faster than that in India. Resource-typed towns in arid northwest China and the resource-typed towns in central India have developed rapidly in recent years. (2) The unbalanced development in India is more prominent than in China; and the regional and provincial development imbalances in China are shrinking, while India’s imbalances are improving slowly and its regional differences are gradually widening. (3) The spatial pattern of land use in both countries shows significant coastal and inland differences. The difference between the east, the central regions, and the west is the main spatial pattern of China’s regional development, while the difference between the north and the south is the spatial pattern of India’s regional development. (4) There are obvious differences in the expansion intensity of core cities between the two countries. From 1997 to 2007, the expansion intensity of core cities in China was relatively higher than that in India, while that in India was relatively higher than that in China from 2007 to 2012.