The Progress of Urbanization in Shanghai

Abstract

With the rapid economic achievement, urbanized area is increasing by 4-5 % per year in China now. It is necessary to realtimely monitor and analyze the changes in a spatial and quantitative way for reasonable utilization of national lands and healthy growth of cities. But the status of development is not clearly mastered by planners and governors because of the lack of spatial information in China, like most of developing countries in the world. This study aims to temporarily and tangibly investigate the progress of urbanization of Shanghai, the biggest city of China, with an integration of GPS (Global Positioning System), RS (Remote Sensing) and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for spatial data acquisition and processing. It is concluded that the urbanized area in Shanghai has been expanded by 2.5 times since 1979 and will probably continue until the beginning of the 21st century. As the results of the analyses at a historical and political viewpoint, the urbanization in Shanghai are relatively political than other developing countries or developed countries. The authors believe that the integrated analytical approach used here is widely applicable to many of cities both in China and other developing countries where few of spatial data is available.