Urban expansion monitoring and driving forces analysis: A case study of Jiangsu Province, China

Urban expansion and land use change was studied in Jiangsu Province with RS and GIS technique, and driving forces was analyzed. Cities studied in this paper include 13 prefecture cities and 51 county cities. Remote sensing images include Landsat MSS, TM and ETM with time series from 1979 to 2000. Jiangsu Province lies in the southeast of China, which is one of the rapidest growing provinces along the coast both in economic development and urbanization level. However, its economic development and urbanization level varies deeply on the regional level. Therefore, it is important to study the relationship between urban economic development and urban expansion in Jiangsu Province. In this paper, we studied the urban expansion intensity and, monitored the land use change around the cities. We analyzed the laws of urban expansion and land use change on the regional level. Moreover, we compared the differentiation of urban expansion and land use change between prefecture cities and county cities. During the monitoring period, the tendency of entire urban expansion intensity was descending all through. The South region's urban expansion intensity was highest of all; the county cities' expansion intensity was higher than that of prefecture cities'. The short-term effect of urban expansion is the lost of arable land and other land resources around the cities. During the monitoring period, the arable land contributed 89% of urban expansion area in Jiangsu; The arable land contributed 95.2% of urban expansion area in north region; The arable land contributed 83.5% and 95.1% land resources for prefecture cities and county cities respectively. We analyzed the driving forces of urban expansion quantitatively. The second industry and housing investment were the main economic driving forces of urban expansion in 13 prefecture cities of Jiangsu Province, and the correlation between urban expansion area and the secondary industrial production increase was 0.902. The macro economy policy, urban development and population management policy, terrain conditions etc., played important role for urban expansion in Jiangsu Province.