Spatiotemporal Pattern And Process Of Urbanization In Perspective Of Urban-rural Integration

Within recent decades, socioeconomy has developed rapidly in China, resulting in extensive urbanization not only in urban center but also in rural area. For the spatiotemporal pattern of urbanization, we not only emphasized on the urban, but also the rural areas. From the perspective of the natural and social science, with a case study of Hangzhou, this paper used various methods to characterize the differences in socioeconomic development, landscape patterns, urban expansion, farmland loss, and life quality between urban and rural from1985to2009. By integrating geographical information systems, landscape ecological method and spatial regression, the driving forces of built up land expansion and farmland loss in urban and rural areas was investigated in the region. It is necessary to protect, utilize, and manage natural resources in both urban and rural areas, thus quantifying the response of landscape pattern to urbanization can provide critical suggestions for monitoring, assessing, and protecting land resouces.The main results and conclusions were listed as follows.Comprehensive analysis of multiple indicators was used to evaluate the socioeconomic conditions in Hangzhou from1985to2009. The gap between urban and rural area with respect of socioeconomic development in Hangzhou was narrowing down. However, urbanization rate in the region showed an unbalanced pattern.At town-scale, evaluation showed that the life quality of some county centers was higher than that of some urban areas. There existed a big gap between the rural and urban area in respect of culture, education and social development level. The Gini coefficients of life quality reflected that the spatial distribution of living facilities was under allocated among rural areas.For the landscape pattern, Hangzhou had undergone great changes from1985to2009. The urban expansion made the landscape more irregular, more fragmentation, more disconnected, which will degrade the stability of the ecosystem. The results of spatial regression showed that the expansion of built-ups influenced patch density significantly. Road had effects on the fragmentation, connectivity and aggregation of the landscape at town scale. Urban center had greater effects on landscape changes in urban. For comparison, the landscape of urban was affected more by urbanization than that of rural, especially in the second time span (1994-2003).The expansion of built-ups was rapid from1985to2009, with the most rapid stage from1994to2003for urban and from2003to2009for rural area, respectively. Binjiang, Xiaoshan and Yuhang, which maintained at a high speed in urban sprawl, brought new power for the urbanization of Hangzhou city. The built-up expansion of urban and rural areas showed distinctive spatiotemporal variations in different time spans.On the whole, with the urbanization the built-up landscape in Hangzhou has become more fragmentation, more irregular, more isolated and more disconnected. In urban area, the built-up patches were aggregated to larger ones and lower their density from2003to2009. However in rural area, the expansion was continuous and the process of urbanization was accelerated in the three stages. Spatial regression was used to explore geographical factors that influenced the changes of built-up landscape pattern. Results showed that the residents preferred to aggregating near the national road and provincial road. Railway only had significant correlations with the increase of built-up area from1985to1994. Highway had more significant effects on built-up landscape changes in urban area than in rural area. The impacts of the urban centers on built-up expansion gradually declined with the urbanization progress. Slope factor was one of the most important determinants of urban growth, especially in rural area. In each stage, distance to rivers had no significant effects on built-up landscape changes. Generally, the changes of built-up landscape showed more spatial autocorrelation in the urban than that in the rural area.These results reflected that in urban area the influences of geographical factors on built-up landscape were greater than that in rural area.The farmland area decreased more and more with the urbanization in the three periods. With the urbanization, the area and aggregation of farmland declined, while the fragmentation and irregularity increased at the same time. The loss of farmland in urban area was faster than that in rural area. The patch density of farmland increased, especially in the district near to the urban center. The built-up expansion was the main factor of the farmland landscape changes. Road had significant influences on the area and aggregation of farmland. However, the urban center declined its impacts on farmland loss. Compared to rural area, higher spatial autocorrelation of farmland landscape showed that the urbanization factors influenced the farmland landscape much more in urban.With the growth of non-agricultural population, the increase of GDP and built-up area, ecosystem service values in Hangzhou declined sharply. At the same time, ecosystem service value per capita/hectare also decreased rapidly. Spatial autocorrelation was considered in analyzing the relationship between spatiotemporal patterns of ecosystem service value and urbanization indicators for the urban and rural area in Hangzhou. City center asserted less effects on ecosystem service value changes, however the road gradually influenced the ecosystem service value, especially in the urban area. Farmland and forest landscape patterns had significant influences on each category of ecosystem service value in urban and rural, respectively. Changes of ecosystem service value in urban and rural showed spatial heterogeneity, and the rural can be used as the ecological services providing areas for urban area.The major contributions from this study were:1) from the perspective of the natural and social science, it focused on the comparison between urban and rural with respects of socioeconomic development, landscape patterns, built-up expansion, farmland loss and life quality from1985to2009;2) comprehensive analysis of multiple indicators was used to evaluate the socioeconomic conditions in Hangzhou from1985to2009and the life quality at town-scale in Hangzhou with GIS method;3) it quantified the spatiotemporal patterns and geographic factors of built-up landscape at town scale using spatial regression; it quantified the spatiotemporal patterns and dynamics of farmland landscape at grid scale with spatial regression;4) it quantified the spatiotemporal patterns and dynamics of ecosystem service value at town scale with spatial regression. However, there were still several limitations and further study should focus on more comparison between urban and rural, more spatiotemporal scales, and various spatial models.