Spatiotemporal Dynamics and Spatial Determinants of Urban Growth in Suzhou, China

Ling Zhang, Yehua Dennis Wei and Ran Meng
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Ling Zhang: Department of Geography, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
Yehua Dennis Wei: Department of Geography, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
Ran Meng: Environmental and Climate Sciences Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973, USA

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 3, 1-22

Abstract: This paper analyzes the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban growth and models its spatial determinants in China through a case study of Suzhou, a rapidly industrializing and globalizing city. We conducted spatial analysis on land use data derived from multi-temporal remote sensing images of Suzhou from 1986 to 2008. Three urban growth types, namely infilling, edge-expansion, and leapfrog, were identified. We used landscape metrics to quantify the temporal trend of urban growth in Suzhou. During these 22 years, Suzhou’s urbanization changed from bottom-up rural urbanization to city-based top-down urban expansion. The underlying mechanism changed from TVE (town village enterprise) driven rural industrialization to FDI (foreign direct investment) driven development zone fever. Furthermore, we employed both global and local logistic regressions to model the probability of urban land conversion against a set of spatial variables. The global logistic regression model found the significance of proximity, neighborhood conditions, and socioeconomic factors. The logistic geographically weighted regression (GWR) model improved the global regression model with better model goodness-of-fit and higher prediction accuracy. More importantly, the local parameter estimates of variables enabled us to exam spatial variations of the influences of variables on urban growth in Suzhou.

Keywords: urban growth; urbanization; landscape metrics; geographically weighted regression (GWR); Suzhou; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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