Understanding The Spatial Evolution Of Hanyang(1949-2009)

Understanding the spatial evolution of those cities is to abstract and summarize the law of urban development under different historical contexts. The study of Chinese cities spatial evolution has received wide research attention, yet most of the spatial analyses have been at rather large geographical scales of analysis. Moreover, the contents of those studies are broad but generally just qualitative descriptions or summaries of phenomena. There lacks in-depth case studies with quantitative analysis. To bridge this research gap, this thesis utilizes both qualitative and quantitative research methods to study the spatial evolution of Hanyang since 1949.Based on the literature review of spatial transformations of Chinese cities, the research hypotheses and research design are proposed. The main aspects of research include transformed land use types, their spatial distributions, spatial patterns and driving forces of the transformation process. The time period to research is from 1949 until 2011, and the entire period is divided into three time periods based on the four aspects. The first period is the planned economy period, from the establishment of PRC to the economic reforms. Wuhan is chosen to be a strategic city for developing industry, which is the focus of the planned economy. Several industrial zones were planned and constructed in Hanyang, leading to a rapid growth of urban land for industrial uses.The second period is the twenty-year's rapid urbanization and industrialization period since the economic reforms in the 1980s. In this period, Hanyang has experienced rapid economic growth, urban development and its urban vibrancy has been improved substantially, leading to a multi-faceted, mixed transformation of urban space. The growth of automobile industry requires large scale land development, resulting in leap-frog growth of land in city fringe areas; new roads and bridges enable urban land expansion along the extended transport network; The increasing urban vitality reinforces the agglomeration effect in urban areas, leading to fringe growth of and infilling growth among existing urban areas.The third period is the recent ten years of deindustrialization in cities, which is also the focus of this paper. During this period, transformation and redevelopment of existing urban land have emerged, despite that there are still considerable amount of land being converted from non-urban to urban uses. Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis methods are utilized to study the process of land transformation in Hanyang. The results show that the urban space in this period has experienced a mixed two-way land transformation, with increasing proportion of land being converted from urban to non-urban uses. Those transformations are the mixed result of top-down government and bottom-up market forces. As China's economic reforms progresses, market forces will play an increasingly important role. Urban planning should also evolve and reform to adapt to the market circumstances, so as to stimulate sustainable urban development.