Xi'an Urban Growth Driving Force Study

The research on modern urban growth and its driving forces is the hot topic of contemporary urban geography as well as the forward-looking topic of theory research and practice about Urban Planning and Design. Xi'an City, which is an important central city of western China, although after several ups and downs in the succession process in history. Xi'an City's urbanization process is significantly speed up in recent years. With its urban development is faster and faster, the urban landscape is changing greatly, and the city's comprehensive competitiveness is rising. Therefore, the study on driving forces of Xi'an city growth has important significance for the formulation of Xi'an city development strategy and the healthy and orderly development of Xi'an.This paper take Xi'an city as the study area and through remote sensing image analysis and statistics, obtained Xi'an City growth change characteristics in spatial distribution and temporal. By extracting and building the needed indexes of Logistic regression model, established Xi'an city growth space model and combining with social and economic indicators, obtained the Xi'an city increase of the main driving force. Article important conclusions include:(1) The urban area of Xi'an has experienced a large-scale growth from 1988 to 2009, which is growing rapidly in recently 10 years. In the growth process, the city center overall emerged a trend of moving northward. Contemporary, the urban land use transformed from extensive development to intensive development gradually.(2) Through the Logistic regression analysis, we obtained the main driving forces of Xi'an city growth as follows:the accessibility of transportation, close to the spread growth of existing urban areas and natural conditions restriction. The analysis of socio-economic indicators on the principal component is also consistent with the above conclusion; reflect urban growth and social economic development are highly coupled in space.(3) According to the characteristics of growth and main driving forces in Xi'an city, we made a forecast about the future urban growth pattern in Xi'an, and based on the "smart growth" concept, put forward urban development planning design of Xi'an suggestions and strategies in future.