An Analysis On The Expansion Of Residential Land And Its Driving Mechanism In Mountainous Cities

Residential land, serving as the place for urban living and leisure, occupies an important part of urban land. After 2000, with the deepening of "the development campaign of the west" strategy in China, the urbanization in western region has entered a stage of rapid development. Meantime, more and more people have been flowing into the cities, forcing tremendous pressure on urban living space. And the further improvement of land use right granting and regulating system puts forward higher requirements for new residential land as well. China’s western region spread out various terrains, especially mountain widely distributed, thus relatively limited for residential land. As with this aspect, the research on the residential growth conditions of mountain cities has a great significance in practice.This paper selected the main city of Chongqing, the only municipality in the western region, as the research object, and chose the remote sensing images respectively from the year of 1978, 1988, 1997, 2006, and 2011 as the basis data. And then, after a detailed quantitative analysis mainly on residential land pattern, the change of land use, and the variation in direction and layer, this paper obtained Chongqing’s residential growth characteristics in several different periods since the reform and opening up in 1978. Based on the result, the paper discussed the driving mechanism of the main city of Chongqing residential land expansion from macro, meso and micro levels.The paper includes the following six chapters:Chapter One introduces its research background, significance, content and technology roadmaps; Chapter Two reviews the relative domestic and foreign researches, defines a number of highly connective concepts, and gives a review and summary of the achievements both domestic and abroad in urban space expansion theory, the quantitative research methods and mode, the drive mechanism and urban residential land expansion; Chapter Three focuses on the overview of the study area and research methods, and then gives a brief introduction of the quantitative methods and statistics models as used herein; Chapter Four is the part of quantitative analysis in residential growth in the main city of Chongqing, under the help of landscape pattern measures, land-use change matrix, analysis methods azimuth circle; Chapter Five analyzes residential growth driven mechanism, from macro, meso and micro, these three levels; Chapter Six is its conclusion and prospect part.The following is the main results of this research:(1) before Chongqing became a municipality and after so, these two periods saw totally different residential land expansion patterns. As for the year of 1978 and 1988, its residential land all located in the urban core area, along the “two rivers”(Jialing River and Yangtze River) and traffic lines, with a smaller annual residential land increment, which was mainly from the occupation of agricultural land; After 1997, however, it featured a clear "multi-center and group development" pattern, where the new residential land, across the landscape barrier, and formed new living groups in the periphery of the core area, presenting a miniaturization trend.(2) Besides, the changes of the national strategic in city construction, the land and housing system, and the urban planning, have the same leading role to mountain cities as that in plain cities. In macro level, these policies establish the pattern of development and the general direction of urban residential land; in meso level, various economic development indicators of the city reflect the overall strength of the city, thus determining the foreign population and capital attraction, which is the "endogenous motivation" for the growth of urban residential land. In Chongqing, the newly increased urban residential has a strong correlation with some special indicators, such as financial institutions foreign currency deposits, investment in fixed assets, general budget revenue, GDP, total retail sales of social consumer goods, the actual utilization of foreign investment and so on; in micro level, factors, like terrain, traffic conditions, space policy, neighborhood index, public facilities, in different periods, have different driving effect on the residential growth of the main city of Chongqing.