Geographic micro-process model: Understanding global urban expansion from a process-oriented view

Abstract Urban expansion across the globe accelerates land cover change and significantly influences the environment and human beings. Measuring the urban expansion process can help us better understand urban expansion dynamics and contribute to urban growth simulation and spatial planning. By using urban land density (defined as the proportion of the built-up area to the buildable area) as a spatial variable, we propose a new model to fit urban land density from the city center outwards (distance-decay rule), based on the assumption that urban shapes are formulated by the accumulation of micro-processes of urban growth. The model is based on simple math with only two parameters that clearly denote urban process characteristics. Using a sample set of 112 large cities around the world at three time points (1990, 2000, and 2014), the proposed model fitted urban expansion data very well, verifying its applicability. One parameter in the model that describes the density gradient can be used to measure the compactness of a city. The model can be easily extended to fit the intermediate process of a given time span and provide a clear indicator of the compactness of the process. The results of our case study clearly show disparities of global cities in terms of urban land compactness. For example, cities in Latin America and the Caribbean are the most compact, cities in Europe and East Asia are moderately compact, and cites in the United States, Canada, and Australia are the most sprawling. Furthermore, we identified a path dependence of urban expansion patterns as well as uneven compactness change trajectories in rapidly urbanizing areas.

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