QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF URBAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL CHINA

Quantifying urban expansion forms is important to understanding regional urbanization processes and urban planning. For this pur-pose, conventional landscape indices are commonly used for quantitative analysis of urban landscape patterns. However, these land-scape indices only reflect information for one particular temporal phase of landscape patterns. This paper studies and quantifies the dynamic changes of urban landscape from 1993 to 2006 in Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan metropolitan areas in Hunan province of China using landscape expansion index (LEI), which contains information of the formation processes of landscape patterns. The re-sults indicate that there are three types of urban expansions: infilling, edge-expansion and outlying in the study area. The change of proportion of the three urban expansion types reveals that urban expansion patterns have changed from a messy, dispersed early de-velopment phase to more compact and reasonable layout from 1993 to 2006. Moreover, the urban expansion modes varied in differ-ent periods. From 1993 to 1996, the edge-expansion and outlying were the main types of urban expansion forms, indicating an early stage of rapid urban developments. Comparing with the edge-expansion, the outlying expansion increased rapidly in this period, which indicates urban development is messy and dispersion. Overall, the edge-expansion was the major type of urban expansion form during the study period with outlying as the second and rapidly-increasing major form of expansion prior to 1998, which indi-cates urbanization is in the early stage of rapid urban developments, and infilling as the second and rapidly-increasing major form of expansion after 1998