Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 6704: The Spatial Pattern of Urban Settlement in China from the 1980s to 2010 (Sustainability)

The dynamic urbanization process of China has stimulated a massive growth of urban settlements in the past few decades. With the development of remote sensing technology and the release of the long-time Landsat archive, spatial characteristics of urban settlement are gradually analyzed on a large scale, and various patterns are developed for describing and analyzing it. However, the urban settlement patterns were mainly quantified by the landscape metrics in existing studies, the underlying features shaping urban settlement pattern were always neglected. In this study, we establish a systematic and comprehensive ‘urban development index system’ for describing China’s urban settlement pattern and its evolutions during the end of the 1980s through to 2010 by using a series of statistical methods. Results show that (1) urban settlement pattern in 2010 is quantified comparatively simpler and more completely than in the end of the 1980s; (2) urban settlements in western and eastern regions present integrated pattern and homogeneous attributes, while urban settlements in central and northeastern regions present relatively complex pattern and various attributes; (3) urban settlements with the most variable pattern are accompanied by the most dynamic population and economic capacity, followed by landscape dispersion. Topographic complexity of urban settlements generally remained unchanged or with slight fluctuations, therefore, it has limited influence on settlement pattern evolution.