The Coupling between Urban Expansion and Population Growth: An Analysis of Urban Agglomerations in China (2005–2020)

Exploring the coordinated development process of people–land allocation in the urbanization process of urban agglomerations is of great significance to promote improvement of the urbanization development level and quality and realize the healthy development of urbanization. We took nine urban agglomerations in China as the research object and the coupling between urban expansion and population growth as the entry point. The overall coupling and the spatial coupling were used to reveal the people–land coupling relationship of nine urban agglomerations at different time periods. We found that both construction land and population within each urban agglomeration were in the stage of continuous growth, and the increase of both was similar and synchronous. The overall and spatial coupling between urban expansion and population growth is increasing. The expansion rate of construction land is a factor that influences the overall and spatial coupling between urban expansion and population growth, i.e., the greater the expansion rate of construction land, the higher the overall and spatial coupling between urban expansion and population growth. This study provides a new perspective for exploring the coupling between urban expansion and population growth and offers a new approach for studying the relationship between the two