Urban Growth Mode And Urban Landscape Pattern Dynamics In Shanghai, China During 1985-2013

In order to alleviate the negative effects of urbanization and help facilitate sustainable urban development, in this paper, time series remotely-sensed imageries, landscape metrics and partial least square regresssion were employed to monitor urban landscape dynamics, to quantify the speed and mode of urban growth, and to identify the main driving forces of urban growth of Shanghai during the rapid urbanization processes from 1985 to 2013. My main findings were as following:(1) The approach of supervised classification integrated with threshold value of normalized difference water index and visual interpretation was a suitable method to classify urban landscape types using remotely-sensed images of Shanghai. The accuracies of urban landscape classification assesed by both quanitity agreement and allocation agreement were more than 90% and all the standard Kappa coefficients exceed 0.74 for the seven periods of 1985,1989,1995,2000,2005,2009 and 2013, respectively.(2) During rapid urbanization, a large number of natural/semi-natural landscape which were dominated by farmland were transformed to urban land use, public green space, aquaculture and other artificial landscape. Urbanization increased landscape fragmentation, the shape of urban and agriculture landscape became more complexity, while green land and water landscape became regulations, urban landscape showed discrete to aggregation distribution, and other non-urban landscape tended to discrete distribution.(3) Urban landscape showed a distinctive spatial pattern along urban-rural gradient, as indicated by landscape metrics. Most landscape metrics showed wave-like pattern with multi-peak, except percentage of urban landscape monotonic decreased. With the rapid urban expansion, the most intensive urban growth zone fell in the rural-urban transition zone, and the buffer zone was gradually away from the urban center. In urban center, urbanization decreased the heterogeneity, fragmentation of the urban landscape, the distribution of landscape tended to be more aggregation and homogenization. While in rural, urbanization increased the fragmentation, heterogeneity and configurational complexity of the urban landscape, the distribution of landscape tended to be more discrete.(4) The area of urban land use type for both entire Shanghai and its eleven districts increased in a way of logistic over time from 1985 to 2013. The growth rate varied ranged from 0.43 times to 13.63 times. Annual growth rate of urban area for entire city of Shanghai and its eleven districts presented wave-like pattern of unimodal or bimodal distribution. The values ranged from 0.05% to 20.92%, the largest value occurred in the period of 1995-2000.(5) We tested the diffusion coalescence hypotheses of urban growth using annual urban area growth rates, landscape expansion index and landscape pattern metrics. The results suggested that the urbanization of Shanghai followed a complex diffusion-coalescence process during the study period.(6) Urban growth of Shanghai was closely related to socio-economic factors, such as non-agricultural population, GDP, the gross industrial output value, the total investment in fixed assets, investment in real estates and the actual utilization of foreign capital, among which economic growth, industrialization and urban population growth were the main driving factors of urban expansion in Shanghai. Meanwhile, investments and the influx of foreign capital also promoted the urban area growth in Shanghai.