Spatial and temporal aspects of land use in the urban-rural fringe in china: a GIS approach

Since the reform in 1979, China's rural and urban economies have been extremely active. This has accelerated greatly the urbanisation process in the peripheral areas of metropolises. Urban regions extended into rural areas by way of urban sprawl and population concentration in the rural-urban fringe, in which the types and structures of land use changed rapidly. The rural-urban fringe has been an extremely active area in contemporary Chinese socio-economy. It is also a belt of concentration of development and construction of rural and urban kinds. In seeking to apply geographical information systems to such an important area of land use change, this research studies the general principles of the formation, evolution and development of rural-urban fringe with a case study in Tianhe District of Guangzhou Municipality, China. This research analyses the following three aspects of land use change. Firstly, the land use conditions and situations are discussed in the form of their fundamental characteristics in various years. Secondly, the spatial changes of land uses are characterised in terms of the distance from the city centre including the effects of the physical landscape. Finally, the main emphasis is put upon the impacts of policies on land use distribution. Three different time periods (1973, 1993 and predicted 2010) are applied to compare the changes of land use. According to the analysis of the trend of land use change in this study, the development of Tianhe District from a traditional rural area to a rural-urban fringe is a considered as result of the Guangzhou urban sprawl. Its specific location, economic development levels, population conditions and policy advantages have influenced this evolution process and brought about the spatial changes and spatial structure of land use. Keywords: Land use change, rural-urban fringe, China, GIS