Tendency and Driving Mechanism of Land Use Change in the Rapid-Urbanization Country Area: the Case of Former Xishan City, Jiangsu Province

Taking the former Xishan city of Wuxi city as the case, this paper analyzed the progress of urbanization and land use change from 1985 to 2000. The driving mechanism of land use change has been analyzed theoretically. Based on the analysis, driving factors causing regional land use change have been selected, and the standard for weighing the intensity of land use change in study area was given. Then the mathematic model of the driving mechanism of land use change has been made. The results of theoretical and mathematic analysis both indicated that regional land use change was mainly affected by the economy development, the increase of population and the progress of urbanization. The marginal occupied tendency of cultivated land was analyzed with regional urbanization by marginal analysis. The result showed that the deadline of cultivated land decreasing would be about in 2014, which meaned that from 2014 cultivated land area would not be occupied because of the progress of urbanization in the study area.