Impact Of Urbanization On Sustainable Development Of Cities

Nowadays, sustainable development is the common goal of regional development. Maintaining the sustainable development of cities in developing countries, where accounting for the world’s majority of population, is the key factor of the feasibility of regional sustainability.With fast economic development, most developing countries have experienced rapid urbanization process, has and this process has exerted comprehensive effects on social-economical development, and led significant changes on the pattern, composition and urban landscape of cities. Therefore, how to understand the relationship between landscape dynamics and social-economic changes led by urbanization, and assess the function of urbanization on the urban system of cities, as well as the sustainability of cities are of great significance. With all theseknowledges, we can make our urban development planning more scientific and policies for the development of cities more rational. Thus, we can take targeted measures to grantee the implementation of these plans and polices promotes the sustainable development of our cities.In this reasearch, we have selcected three urban regions as our study area, they were Xi’an, Yantai and Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area (TEDA). We analyzed remote sensing data and landscape dynamic by using the software of ENVI 4.8 and FRAGSTATS 3.3, selected sustainability indicators through questionnaire survey procedure (QSP) and nominal group technique (NGT), formed frameworks for assessing sustainability by adopting enhanced DPSIR framework (eDPSIR), top-down expert-lead and bottom-up community-involved framework, and calculated the sustainability of study areas and correlation among indicators. The main results are as follows:1. With the same trend of urbanization process as in most megacities, Xi’an has formed a huge, radially expanded central urban area; While in Yantai, the urbanization process was initiated from counties/distrcts, and the urban area was decentralized expanded without an obvious central urban area, which was the same pattern of urbanization as in some big and medium cities.2. There are two main driving forces of urbanization in Xi’an, they were the amount of population in urban area and the industrial development; While in Yantai, the urbanization process was promoted by increasing of gross population and fulfilled investment of infrastructure, especially by construction of road traffic.3. Although the patterns of urbanization in Xi’an and Yantai were varied, they have exerted the similar impacts on the sustainability of cities. The urbanization process has positive effects on the sustainability of cities,but there was an obvious“time lag”between them, and the bigger the city, the longer the“time lag”.. 1988-2010, the urbanization rate of Xi’an rose 60%, meanwhile the sustainability of Xi’an increased by 177%; 1990-2010, the urbanization rate of Yantai showed 115% increment, while the sustainability of Yantai rose 211% in the same time.4. The impacts of urbanization on urban landscape dynamic in Xi’an and Yantai were similar. In Xi’an, the fragmentation of urban patches increased by 110% from 1984 to 2010, dominance rose 138%, isolation declined by 76%, aggregation with 5% increasing, and connectivity gained 2% increments; in Yantai, the fragmentation of urban patches increased by 7646% from 1979 to 2010, dominance rose by 332%, isolation declined by 91%, aggregation gained 2% decrements, and connectivity increased by 1%.5. Indicators that selected for assessing sustainability of urban area should follow the Specific-Measurable-Available-Relative-Time related-‘SMART’principle.6. While assessing the sustainability of urban area, methodological frameworks should be chosen according to the scale of research area. For a city area with administrative boundary, top-down expert-led framework should be used, since it can compose the spatial changes detection with the social-economic analysis; for a regional urban area where belong to a city, bottom-up community-involved framework should be adopted, it can evaluate the sustainability of such area by combining the opinions from local communities with the ideas from experts of perfessional background.7. Based on the results of case studies in Xi’an, Yantai and TEDA, the method for assessing the sustainability of urban area in different scales were presented in this study.