Urban growth and spatial restructuring patterns: The case of Yangtze River Delta Region, China

Abstract

The year 1995 has been widely identified as a watershed in China’s urbanisation process. The period before was deemed as ‘urbanisation from below’ with a focus on small cities and towns, whereas the period afterwards has been characterised by the ‘land-centred development’ of large cities. This paper argues that there have been further spatial and temporal differentiations since 2000. By adopting a city-regional perspective of urban land expansion, the urban growth and spatial-restructuring process of different levels of cities in Yangtze River Delta Region were examined. Different indicators and technical measures such as spatial autocorrelation analysis and Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping analysis were employed to examine growth rates, growth intensity levels and the spatial clustering patterns of 15 city-regions over three time periods between 1985 and 2007. Through the development of a unified land classification system with satellite images, and the use of the GIS grid-overlay method, our analysis overcomes various identified methodological problems of previous research.