The Spatiotemporal Analysis of Urban Sprawl Using Remote Sensing Data and Geographic Information System in Shenzhen, China

Shenzhen located in South China has experienced a rapid period of construction land expansion over the past three decades. This paper focuses on the pattern change and the sprawl categories about the construction land integrating remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS). We analyzed the spatial and temporal patterns of the construction land for the three counties in Shenzhen. The overlay of the construction land maps for two adjacent years was used to generate the sprawl categories map. The main three sprawl categories named infilling sprawl, edge-expansion sprawl and outlying sprawl were calculated and analyzed about their distribution and the change over the study years in the three counties. The Result showed that the construction land in the study area had increased dramatically from 19.55 km² in 1979 to 894.31 km² in 2005. The outlying sprawl was the major sprawl category. The patterns of sprawl categories among the study counties were quite different in different study periods.