A Case Study on Space-Time Expansion Characteristic of Urban Construction Land in Taizhou Metropolitan Area, Jiangsu, 1988-2008: An Analysis from the Perspective of Mega-Events Driving Forces

With the transformation of China´s economy and social development, the issue of spatial expansion of the urban construction land and its driving forces has drawn extensive attention from both academic researchers and government departments. The analysis from the perspective of mega-events driving forces is firstly adopted in this paper, to take Taizhou metropolitan area in Jiangsu Province as a case study, which is a representative in the Yangtze River Delta in China´s urbanization process. Remote sensing interpretation data of Landsat TM, and ALOS which represent main years´ images of Taizhou metropolitan area within the last 20 years are used in the analysis. From the perspective of mega-events driving forces, statistical analysis, together with remote sensing, geographic information system methods and procedure analysis, is adopted to analyze the spatial expansion of urban construction land in Taizhou metropolitan area. The main conclusions are: the mega-events driving forces play an important role in spatial expansion of the urban construction land. In different periods the driving forces of spatial expansion of the urban construction land are significantly influenced by the national, regional and urban mega-events. For the last two decades, the dominant patterns of Taizhou metropolitan area urban construction land, in terms of spatial expansion, are spot-filling and extension, as well as transformation, point-axle corridor pattern, and satellite city pattern, which jointly form an net expansion pattern. The temporal expansion, however, is characterized by rotating development between the south and the north districts, and between urban districts, rural villages, and port regions along the Yangtze River. No research on such issue before was from the perspective of the mega-events driving forces, so this is the academic innovation in this paper.