Assessment of urbanization basing on city spatial analysis in a region

Urban expansion in which non-urban land use turned to urban land use is an important aspect of urbanization.Taking Fuqing of south China as a case,this paper discusses the method of assessment of urbanization using urban expansion data.To reveal the actual change of land use type,remote-sensing technology was employed,which extracted the urban land use information from two Landsat TM inages of 1991 and 1996 respectively.It indicates that urban land use of Fuqing has grown by 16.17 km from non-urban land during the 5-year study period,1.2 times more than that in 1991.The obtained spatial data of urban expansion are integrate with socio-economic data on GIS where an overlay analysis adopted assisted with multi-regression and principal components analysis to show the direction of the expansion.With the help of multi-factor analysis the driving forces of urban land use expansion are identified as rapid industry developmant and non-agriculture population incruement.The study also concludes that the speed or urbanization is slower than that of economic growth and urban expansion.