Spatial Analysis and Present Situation Evaluation of Urban Residential Land Suitability Based on GIS: A Case Study in Changchun, China

Analysis and evaluation of urban residential land suitability plays an important role in the overall plan of urban land and coordination subsystem, and has important significance in improving the quality of urban inhabited environment. This paper discussed how to analyze and evaluate the suitability of urban residential land qualitatively and efficiently, taking Changchun, China as study area by GIS technology. The study began with the establishment of evaluation index system which consisted of two steps: Index Selection and Indexes Weight Determination which applied the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. Then analysis and evaluation was carried out on the spatial distribution map of residential suitability obtained by raster calculation in ArcGIS 9.2. The application of geometric road network is a great improvement compared with the previous methods which was based on straight line distance, thus making the spatial distribution map more reasonable. The analysis result indicates that the closer to the center of Changchun, the higher and the greater fluctuation of residential suitability presented. And the present situation evaluation result not only shows that the residential land distribution of Changchun basically corresponds with the analysis result talked above, but also proves that there is a significant negative correlation between the residential land suitability and the distance from residential areas to the city center by correlation analysis.