A Study on Driving Force of Urban Land Expansion during Rapid Urbanization

Based on principal components analysis,partial correlation and regression approaches using SPSS(Statistics Package for Social Science),this essay analyses the processes of urban expansion and quantifies its relationship with economics development and population growth from 1990 to 2002 in Fujian Province.The results show that the total urban land areas are linearly increased from 1990,and highly related to the growth of GDP,urban population and land requirement for the improvement of urban environment.During the last 13 years,the land areas of urban built-up area annually go up in the speed of about 24.83 km~2.Development of economics can better explain the expansion of urban land use than urban population through partial correlation.The economy development is the most important driving factor on the urban land expansion;it can not only directly drive the expansion of urban land use,but also indirectly affect it through urban population growth and urban environment changing.