DECOMPOSITION ANALYSIS OF POPULATION CHANGE AND ITS DETERMINANTS IN BEIJING-TIANJIN-HEBEI METROPOLITAN REGION

This paper provides two scenarios of population change and its spatial distribution at the county level in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region: three residential patterns and three population growth groups. The findings show that population change in this region mainly agglomerated to the urban districts and areas of fast population growth in the period of 1990-2000. Regression results also provide details on the contribution of a number of determinants to the population change in the divisions of each scenario. This research concludes by arguing the necessity of future population studies in terms of different regional or local conditions.Decomposition; Population change; Determinants; Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei

中国と日本における都市発展及びその環境への影響の総合評価に関する研究

This study mainly focused on the spatial effect on city development. Spatial analysis was conducted to explore the characteristics and correlates of city development, and its impact on environment for cities in China and Japan. The issue of city development was investigated from multiple perspectives. The history of urban development process in China and Japan was summarized, and the correlates with urban development were compared. Meanwhile, the urban heat island of cities in China and Japan were compared北九州市立大

Urban expansion and agricultural land loss in China: A multiscale perspective

China’s rapid urbanization has contributed to a massive agricultural land loss that could threaten its food security. Timely and accurate mapping of urban expansion and urbanization-related agricultural land loss can provide viable measures to be taken for urban planning and agricultural land protection. In this study, urban expansion in China from 2001 to 2013 was mapped using the nighttime stable light (NSL), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and water body data. Urbanization-related agricultural land loss during this time period was then evaluated at national, regional, and metropolitan scales by integrating multiple sources of geographic data. The results revealed that China’s total urban area increased from 31,076 km2 in 2001 to 80,887 km2 in 2013, with an average annual growth rate of 13.36%. This widespread urban expansion consumed 33,080 km2 of agricultural land during this period. At a regional scale, the eastern region lost 18,542 km2 or 1.2% of its total agricultural land area. At a metropolitan scale, the Shanghai–Nanjing–Hangzhou (SNH) and Pearl River Delta (PRD) areas underwent high levels of agricultural land loss with a decrease of 6.12% (4728 km2) and 6.05% (2702 km2) of their total agricultural land areas, respectively. Special attention should be paid to the PRD, with a decline of 13.30% (1843 km2) of its cropland. Effective policies and strategies should be implemented to mitigate urbanization-related agricultural land loss in the context of China’s rapid urbanization

The urbanization impact in China: A prospective model (1992-2025)

The gradual spread of urbanization, the phenomenon known under the term urban sprawl, has become one of the paradigms that have characterized the urban development since the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. The arrival of electrification to nearly every corner of the planet is certainly the first and more meaningful indicator of artificialization of land. In this sense, the paper proposes a new methodology designed to identify the highly impacted landscapes in China based on the analysis of the satellite image of nighttime lights. The night-lights have been used widespread in scientific contributions, from building human development indices, identifying megalopolis or analyzing the phenomenon of urbanization and sprawl, but generally they have not been used to forecast the urbanization in the near future. This paper proposes to study the urbanization impact in China between 1992 and 2013, and models a hypothesis of future scenarios of urbanization (2013-2025). For this purpose, the paper uses DMSP-OLS Nighttime Lights (1992 – 2013). After obtaining a homogeneous series for the whole period 1992- 2013, we proceed to model the spatial dynamics of past urbanization process using thePeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationChina’s retail sector has undertaken tremendous transformation since its opening to foreign investment in 1992. Retail transnational corporations have expanded rapidly in this emerging market. Yet relatively little is known about how they have embedded in the Chinese market and expanded spatially and temporally. China has experienced unprecedented urbanization since the onset of economic reform in 1978. Dramatic land use and land cover (LULC) change and urban expansion have taken place in the past three decades. Detailed time-series analysis of LULC change and urban growth in Chinese cities is still scant. This dissertation focuses on the expansion of foreign hypermarket retailers in China and the urban growth in one Chinese city, Suzhou. This research analyzes the penetration strategy and local embeddedness of foreign hypermarket retailers, examines their spatial inequality and dynamics at different geographical levels, and identifies their location determinants through binary logistic regression models. This study applies random forest classification to multitemporal Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images of Suzhou for LULC change analysis, employs landscape metrics and Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis to investigate urban growth patterns, and develops global and local logistic regression models to identify determinants of urban growth. The results indicate that spatiotemporal expansion of foreign hypermarket retailers has been largely dictated by the gradual liberalization policy of the Chinese government. Their local embeddedness has been impacted by both home and host economies. Relative gaps in foreign hypermarkets among three macro regions are narrowing while absolute gaps are widening. Provincial foreign hypermarket distribution has shown significant clustering in the Yangtze River Delta since 2005. Their distribution in Shanghai has changed from dispersion to intensified clustering and shown a clear trend of suburbanization. This study confirms that the random forest algorithm can effectively classify the heterogeneous landscape in Suzhou and LULC change has accelerated from 1986 to 2008. Three urban growth types, edge-expansion, infilling, and leapfrog are identified. Compared with the global model, the geographically weighted logistic regression model has overall better goodness-of-fit and provides more insights to spatial variations of the influence of underlying factors on urban growth

Evolution of Urban Spatial Clusters in China: A Graph-Based Method Using Nighttime Light Data

An urban spatial cluster (USC) describes one or more geographic agglomerations and the linkages among cities. USCs are conventionally delineated based on predefined administrative boundaries of cities, without considering the dynamic and evolving nature of the spatial extent of USCs. This study uses Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) nighttime light (NTL) satellite images to quantitatively detect and characterize the evolution of USCs. We propose a dynamic minimum spanning tree (DMST) and a subgraph partitioning method to identify the evolving USCs over time, which considers both the spatial proximity of urban built-up areas and their affiliations with USCs at the previous snapshot. China is selected as a case study for its rapid urbanization process and the cluster-based economic development strategy. Four DMSTs are generated for China using the urban built-up areas extracted from DMSP/OLS NTL satellite images collected in 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012. Each DMST is partitioned into various subtrees and the urban built-up areas connected by the same subtree are identified as a potential USC. By inspecting the evolution of USCs over time, three different types of USCs are obtained, including newly emerging, single-core, and multicore clusters. Using the rank-size distribution, we find that large-sized USCs have greater development than medium- and small-sized USCs. A clear directionality and heterogeneity are observed in the expansions of the ten largest USCs. Our study provides further insight for the understanding of urban system and its spatial structures, and assists policymakers in their planning practices at national and regional scales

Monitoring of Urban Sprawl and Densification Processes in Western Germany in the Light of SDG Indicator 11.3.1 Based on an Automated Retrospective Classification Approach

By 2050, two-third of the world’s population will live in cities. In this study, we develop a framework for analyzing urban growth-related imperviousness in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) from the 1980s to date using Landsat data. For the baseline 2017-time step, official geodata was extracted to generate labelled data for ten classes, including three classes representing low, middle, and high level of imperviousness. We used the output of the 2017 classification and information based on radiometric bi-temporal change detection for retrospective classification. Besides spectral bands, we calculated several indices and various temporal composites, which were used as an input for Random Forest classification. The results provide information on three imperviousness classes with accuracies exceeding 75%. According to our results, the imperviousness areas grew continuously from 1985 to 2017, with a high imperviousness area growth of more than 167,000 ha, comprising around 30% increase. The information on the expansion of urban areas was integrated with population dynamics data to estimate the progress towards SDG 11. With the intensity analysis and the integration of population data, the spatial heterogeneity of urban expansion and population growth was analysed, showing that the urban expansion rates considerably excelled population growth rates in some regions in NRW. The study highlights the applicability of earth observation data for accurately quantifying spatio-temporal urban dynamics for sustainable urbanization and targeted planning

Nighttime Lights as a Proxy for Economic Performance of Regions

Studying and managing regional economic development in the current globalization era demands prompt, reliable, and comparable estimates for a region’s economic performance. Night-time lights (NTL) emitted from residential areas, entertainment places, industrial facilities, etc., and captured by satellites have become an increasingly recognized proxy for on-ground human activities. Compared to traditional indicators supplied by statistical offices, NTLs may have several advantages. First, NTL data are available all over the world, providing researchers and official bodies with the opportunity to obtain estimates even for regions with extremely poor reporting practices. Second, in contrast to non-standardized traditional reporting procedures, the unified NTL data remove the problem of inter-regional comparability. Finally, NTL data are currently globally available on a daily basis, which makes it possible to obtain these estimates promptly. In this book, we provide the reader with the contributions demonstrating the potential and efficiency of using NTL data as a proxy for the performance of regions

El urban sprawl : un modelo de urbanización insostenible

Tesi en modalitat de compendi de publicacions, amb diferents articles retallats per drets de l'editor.(English) he present thesis consists in a PhD thesis by compendium of publications. The general objective of the thesis is the analysis of the phenomenon of the Urban Sprawl, on a planetary scale, starting from the hypothesis that it is an unsustainable process. For the development, specific objectives were set that include the evolution of the research through a selection of 20 papers. The objectives are: a) Analyzing the Urban Sprawl urbanization model, by reviewing the specialized literature; b) Studying the genesis and evolution c) Quantify the Urban Sprawl from databases of local, regional and global, raising the question: is the Sprawl a phenomenon of planetary scope? d) Verify the hypothesis that in Europe, despite having a relatively dense metropolitan structure, there is a pronounced process of Urban Sprawl in the peripheries of large cities e) Define the “city” in the Sprawl era, defining urban and metropolitan systems based on morphological, economic and functional criteria f) Develop a methodology for the analysis of the internal structure of metropolises, capable of contrasting the degree of monocentrism and polycentrism of urban and metropolitan systems and verify the hypothesis that a higher degree of polycentrism reduces the degree of Sprawl (+ Polycentrism =-Sprawl) g) Apply this methodology to the analysis of specific cases, such as the Spanish urban system h) Apply the above methodology to analyze the efficiency in land consumption of the metropolitan systems of Madrid and Barcelona, Los Angeles and Chicago i) Analyze the process of urbanization through the land impacted by urbanization on a global scale, through images of night lights, delimiting metropolitan and megalopolitan areas and defining the different landscapes of human settlements j) Assess suitability of nighttime images to identify urban areas (in relation to rural settlements), and especially the Urban Sprawl, as well as, quantify the retrospective (and prospective) dynamics of the urbanization process (with special attention to China) k) Evaluate the climatic behavior of dispersed and low-density fabrics in comparison to the rest of urban and rural fabrics and uses; l) Study the daytime and nighttime Urban Heat Island (UHI), its spatial distribution and climatic performance of the different types of land covers; m) Study the urban factors that increase the adaptation of cities to global warming, specifically, urban parks as islands of cold in the context of the UHI n) Analyze the effects of heat waves on health, as well as the effect of urban greenery. The thesis, on the one hand, confirms the hypothesis of the unsustainability of the Urban Sprawl, since it implies a high consumption of land, in addition to generating unsustainable mobility. In the same way, it implies a fragmented and dispersed urbanization model, higher energy consumption and promotes social segregation. On the other hand, from the perspective of adaptation to climate change, the Urban Sprawl undoubtedly has a better performance, mainly due to the quality and quantity of green areas present in this type of urban fabric (absent in the central and dense city) and its proximity to those rural or forest areas, which are spaces that produce fresh air. The great challenge of spatial and urban planning is to stop this process of urban expansion without compromising the quality of life, comfort and human health. In this sense, it is necessary to proceed with a radical regeneration of the inherited urban fabrics. The compact city model cannot simply be considered the paradigm of sustainability. It must learn from the green spaces per inhabitant present in the Sprawl. Therefore, it can be concluded that green compactness is the new paradigm of 21st century cities.(Español) La tesis consiste en una tesis por compendio de publicaciones y el objetivo central es el análisis del fenómeno de la dispersión de la urbanización llamado Urban Sprawl a escala planetaria, partiendo de la hipótesis de que se trata de un proceso insostenible. Para el desarrollo de la misma se plantearon objetivos específicos que han sido desarrollados a través de artículos. Estos objetivos son: a) analizar el modelo del Urban Sprawl, mediante la revisión de la literatura especializada b) estudiar su génesis y evolución c) cuantificar el Urban Sprawl a partir de bases de datos de alcance local, regional y mundial, planteando la interrogante ¿es el Sprawl un fenómeno de alcance planetario? d) verificar la hipótesis de que en Europa, a pesar de tener una estructura metropolitana relativamente densa, existe un acusado proceso de Urban Sprawl en las periferias de las grandes ciudades e) delimitar la “ciudad” en la era del Sprawl, definiendo los sistemas urbanos y metropolitanos a partir de criterios morfológicos, económicos y funcionales f) desarrollar una metodología para el análisis de la estructura interna de las metrópolis, capaz de contrastar el grado de monocentrismo y policentrismo de los sistemas urbanos y metropolitanos y verificar la hipótesis de que un mayor grado de policentrismo atenúa el grado de Sprawl (+ Policentrismo = - Sprawl) g) aplicar dicha metodología al análisis de casos concretos, como es el sistema urbano español h) aplicar la anterior metodología para analizar la eficiencia en el consumo de suelo de los sistemas metropolitanos de Madrid y Barcelona, Los Ángeles y Chicago i) Analizar el proceso de urbanización a través del suelo impactado por la urbanización a escala mundial, por medio de imágenes de luces nocturnas, delimitando áreas metropolitanas y megalopolitanas a escala mundial y definiendo en las mismas los diferentes paisajes de los asentamientos humanos j) evaluar la capacidad de las luces nocturnas para identificar las áreas urbanas y muy especialmente el Urban Sprawl, así como cuantificar la dinámica retrospectiva (y prospectiva) del proceso de urbanización (con especial atención a China); k) evaluar el comportamiento climático de los tejidos dispersos y de baja densidad en comparación al resto de tejidos y usos urbanos y rurales; l) Estudiar la Isla de Calor Urbana (UHI) diurna y nocturna, su distribución espacial y comportamiento climático de los diferentes tipos de cubiertas de suelo; m) estudiar los factores urbanísticos que incrementan la adaptación de las ciudades al calentamiento global, específicamente, los parques urbanos como islas de frío en el contexto de la UHI; y n) analizar los efectos que tienen las olas de calor en la salud, así como el efecto del verde urbano. La tesis, por un lado, confirma la hipótesis de la insostenibilidad del Urban Sprawl, dado que implica un alto consumo de suelo, además de generar una movilidad insostenible. Del mismo modo, implica un modelo de urbanización fragmentado y disperso, un mayor consumo energético y promueve la segregación social. Por otro lado, desde la perspectiva de la adaptación al cambio climático, el Urban Sprawl tiene sin duda un mejor comportamiento, principalmente por la calidad y cantidad de espacio verde presente en este tipo de tejido urbano (ausente en la ciudad central y densa) y su proximidad a aquellas zonas rurales o forestales, que son espacios que producen aire fresco. El gran desafío de la planificación territorial y urbana es detener este proceso de expansión urbana sin comprometer la calidad de vida, el confort y la salud humana. En este sentido, es necesario proceder a una reforma radical de los tejidos urbanos heredados. El modelo de ciudad compacta no puede ser considerado simplemente el paradigma de la sostenibilidad. Debe aprender de la mayor cantidad de espacios verdes por habitante presente en el Sprawl. Por tanto, concluir que la compacidad verde es el nuevo paradigma de las ciudades del siglo XXI.Postprint (published version