Over The Past 1990 Years Culture Area Settlement Spatial Scale And Its Research

Settlement geography is the important research content of Human Geography, which is an important cut-in point of studying man-land relationship. With the city constrction and rapid development of city economy in the last few decades, the geographical community turned around the target to the city and a lot of achievements were generated. The study of rural settlement started earlier, but it was relatively weak. So far, there were fewer cases of an overall study of urban and rural settlements, especially in the western mountains. However, it is lack of systematic research on urban and rural settlements spatial morphology evolution. With the advance of the urbanization process in recent years, the promulgation and implementation of urban and rural planning law, and the Construction of the New Socialistic Countryside, which provided opportunities for the development of urban and rural settlements. The paper took urban-rural settlement scale expansion and its spatial morphology evolution in Shangzhou District as the research content and used the methods such as combining qualiative analysis and quantitative model, the combination of GIS technique and mathematical statistics. In the article, urban-rural settlement scale expansion and its spatial morphology evolution in Shangzhou District were analyzed systematically and studied synthetically. The driving factors of urban-rural settlement development evolution were discussed and analyzed.(1) Percent of settlement, settlement expansion Index and location quotient index were selected to analyze the scale of urban-rural settlement expansion in Shangzhou District from1990to2010. The results showed that the scale of settlement increased continuously in Shangzhou District from1990to2010. The settlement area increased from5128.56hm2to8292.34hm2, and the percent of settlement from1.94%to3.14%; The fluctuation of settlement expansion strength was first increased then decreased, and the settlement expansion strength was weak during all the study period; The settlement location indexes were always above1. The settlement scale had location significance and its comparative advantage was remarkable. (2) Multiple Linear Regression model was used to analyze the driving factors of the settlement scale expansion in Shangzhou District. The results showed that total population, the level of urbanization, road traffic mileage, gross domestic product (GDP) and social fixed assets investment are the main driving factors in the effect of the settlement scale expansion in Shangzhou District, and the main driving forces are population, urbanization and social economic development.(3) The research applied GIS as a basic methodology to investigate the spatial distribution pattern of the settlements of Shangzhou District in Shaanxi Province. Many basic characteristics of how the distribution of the settlements is affected by both nature and economic factors are found by means of many GIS based data processing methods. The results showed that settlements in Shangzhou District had a zonal spatial distribution along river, road and valley, which show an characteristic of overall disperse and local concentrate. The settlements are mainly distributed in the areas around town and country, as well as near river and road with lower elevation and small gradient. The distribution of settlement density showed some trend that the settlement density reduced with the increase of the elevation and slope and increased with the increase of the convenient traffic degrees and town radiation intensity. As time goes on, settlement concentrated in the regions with better natural environment and regional conditions in Shangzhou District.(4) The settlement fractional dimension, settlement resolution, settlement fragmentation degree and settlement shape index have been selected to analyze the evolution of the settlement spatial form in Shangzhou District. The results show that: In the years between1990and2010, the settlement fractional dimension rose at first, then decreased; the complex degree of the settlement spatial form went up at first, then went down; the effect of the linear fitting for the settlement plaques area logarithm and the settlement plaques perimeter logarithm is good; all these show that the settlement spatial form has an obvious fractal feature, that is the settlement spatial irregular degree increased slowly during the first half of research period, and the settlement stability reduced; in the second half period, the settlement fractional dimension reduced from1.58to1.54, which means the settlement tend to be regularization and the stability enhanced. During the years between1990and2010, the settlement resolution in Shangzhou District show a continuous decrease, and the resolution index reduced from1.84to0.97. At the same time, the spatial separation degree of the Settlement plaques continued to drop, and then the settlements plaques became more and more compact in the spatial distribution. In the years between1990and2010, the fragmentation degree of the settlement plaques in Shangzhou District rose at first and then decreased; during the first half of the study period, the settlement plaques in Shangzhou District tend to be complicated, and the settlement spatial form was more and more closed to the flat long rectangular. The spatial distribution of the settlement became stable and the settlement spatial form was close to a square increasingly in Shangzhou District during the second half of the study period.(5) The gray relation analysis (GRA) was used to identify the driving factors of the settlement spatial form evolution, and analyze the inner drive mechanism. This paper has pointed out that the evolution of the settlement spatial form is the result of the interaction of natural environment social and economic factors, traffic location and polices.Based on the above conclusions and the idea of overall regional development, some practical ways and measures were proposed to promote the development of region settlement and the optimization of settlement spatial structure. It has important meaning to promote the construction of urban-rural system and the coordinated development of all regions.