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Evaluating urban expansion and land

use change in Shijiazhuang, China, by
using GIS and remote sensing
Yanjun Shen

Landscape and Urban Planning

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 Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80

Evaluating urban expansion and land use change in Shijiazhuang,

China, by using GIS and remote sensing
Jieying Xiaoa , Yanjun Shenb,∗ , Jingfeng Gec , Ryutaro Tateishia , Changyuan Tanga ,
Yanqing Liangd , Zhiying Huange
a Graduate School of Science and Technology, Chiba University, Yayoi 1-33, Inage, Chiba 263-8522, Japan
b Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, Komaba 4-6-1, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8505, Japan
c College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, Hebei Normal University, Yuhua Rd. 1, Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province 050016, China
d School of Civil Engineering, Shijiazhuang Railway Institute, East Bei-Erhuan Rd. 17, Shijiazhuang 050016, China
e College of Natural Resources, Shijiazhuang University of Economics, Huainan Rd. 302, Shijiazhuang 050031, China

Received 6 August 2004; received in revised form 5 December 2004; accepted 6 December 2004
Available online 11 February 2005

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated study of urbanization trends in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province of China, by using
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing. The study explores the temporal and spatial characteristics of
urban expansion from 1934 to 2001, and land use/cover change from 1987 to 2001. Temporally, urban expansion shows fast and
slow growth stages, with the high-speed growth districts shifting to the east or west side of the city. The spatial patterns of urban
growth can be categorized into three types: special objectives oriented type, social-political intervention type, and normal urban
growth type. The remotely detected land use/cover change from 1987 to 2001 shows that the land use/cover was largely changed.
The land use/cover conversion relationship implies that these changes are governed by urban expansion, which produces a force
to drive the land use changes in search of a higher return. Lastly, the major factors influencing urban expansion and land use/cover
change are also discussed. In general, the population, traffic conditions, industrialization, and policy are the major factors that
influenced the urban expansion.
© 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Urban expansion; Land cover change; GIS; Remote sensing; TM; Shijiazhuang

1. Introduction

In recent decades, research on land use/land cover

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +81 3 5452 6382; change has become an important aspect of global
fax: +81 3 5452 6383. change, or global warming studies, since land use/land
E-mail address: sheny@rainbow.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp (Y. Shen). cover change is a major factor for global change

0169-2046/$20.00 © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2004.12.005
70 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80
because of its interactions with climate, ecosystem
processes, biogeochemical cycles, biodiversity, and,
even more important, human activities (e.g., López et
al., 2001; Aguilar et al., 2003). For this reason, Land
Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) was, therefore,
treated as one core joint project of the International
Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and Interna-
tional Human Dimensions Program on Global Environ-
mental Change (IHDP). In the last 10 years, much more
attention has been paid to urban land use/land cover
change because ecosystems in urban areas are strongly
affected by human activities and have close relations
with the life of almost half of the world’s population
(Stow and Chen, 2002.)
Remote sensing provides spatially consistent data
sets that cover large areas with both high spatial detail
and high temporal frequency. Dating back to 1960, re-
mote sensing can also provide consistent historical time
series data. The importance of remote sensing was em-
phasized as a “unique view” of the spatial and temporal
dynamics of the processes in urban growth and land use
change (Herold et al., 2003). Satellite remote sensing
techniques have, therefore, been widely used in detect-
ing and monitoring land cover change at various scales
with useful results (e.g., Stefanov et al., 2001; Wilson et
al., 2003). Recently, remote sensing has been used in
combination with Geographical Information Systems
(GIS) and Global Positioning Systems to assess land
cover change more effectively than by remote sens-
ing data only (Müller and Zeller, 2002; Weng, 2002).
It has already proved useful in mapping urban areas,
and as data source for the analysis and modeling of
urban growth and land use/land cover change (e.g.,
Grey et al., 2003; Herold et al., 2003; Wilson et al.,
2003).
China has experienced rapid development over the
last two decades. Together with economic develop-
ment, the landscape has changed significantly (Liu
et al., 2003). In the context of urbanization, large
amounts of agricultural lands have been changed with
built-up or urban land-use. The impacts of the land-
scape change on the environment due to urbaniza-
tion are significant (Carlson and Traci Arthur, 2000;
Shen et al., 2003). In China, research has reported on
the urbanization and consequential land cover change
of some large cities such as Beijing (Gu, 1999; Liu
et al., 2000), Guangzhou (Weng, 2002), of the new
economic star city of Shenzhen (Shi et al., 2000;
Sui and Zeng, 2001), and of the historical city of Lhasa
(Zhang et al., 2000). However, less attention has been
paid to the big cities in the middle of China which cor-
rectly depict the general situation of urbanization and
consequential landscape change in China.
Shijiazhuang, as the capital of Hebei Province, is a
typical city in the middle of China. Its developmental
characteristics and land use change provide good rep-
resentatives of the middle China cities, since most of
them have experienced the same political, economic,
and technical revolution events. In this study, we use
the spatial analysis function of GIS to specify the urban
expansion characteristics of Shijiazhuang City, China,
during the past 70 years, and then, use two scenes of
Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images to detect and
evaluate the land use and land cover change that oc-
curred in the last 14 years. The objectives of the present
study are:
• to explore the temporal and spatial characteristics of
urban expansion in last 70 years;
• to detect and evaluate the land use and land cover
change due to urbanization between 1987 and 2001,
and output land cover maps; and
• to analyze the main factors governing urbanization
and land use and land cover change.
2. Description of the study area
The study area is located in North China
(Fig. 1) between the range of 114◦ 23′ E–114◦ 42′ E and
37◦ 58′ N–38◦ 60′ N, with an area of around 341.63 km2 ,
which covers the whole city of Shijiazhuang and its
near suburban fringe. Shijiazhuang lies on the allu-
vial fan of Hutuo river with a slight slope of about
1.5‰ declining from Northwest to Southeast. The
semiarid monsoon climate determines its precipita-
tion, which is only about 500 mm/year with around
two-thirds of which occurring in July and August.
Hutuo river runs through the North side of Shiji-
azhuang, and has become a seasonal river mainly due
to the mass exploitation and utilization of water re-
sources the in North China plain over the last 40 years.
Nowadays, the regional water scarcity in the whole
North China plain is becoming the biggest environ-
mental problem and the barrier to sustainable develop-
ment.
 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80
Fig. 1. The position of Shijiazhuang in Mainland China.
Shijiazhuang is the capital and the largest city in
the Hebei Province and is important as the center of
administration, culture, economy and transportation.
The current population is around 1.6 million. In the
early 1900s, it was just a small village with less than
600 inhabitants. The construction of the Jing-Guang
railway line (Beijing to Guangzhou) and Shi-Tai line
(Shijiazhuang to Taiyuan) provided it a good opportu-
nity for development. During WWII, the city extended
fast because of its important position in military oper-
ations. After becoming the capital of Hebei Province
in 1968, it experienced rapid development with expan-
sion of its urban extent. Especially in the last 20 years of
economic reform, urban expansion in Shijiazhuang has
been very significant. According to the Economic An-
nals of 2001, its population and built-up area are 1.6
million and 165.5 km2 . As a result, the landscape of
Shijiazhuang region was largely changed. The impacts
on the hydrological environment due to urbanization
are very significant in this case (Shen et al., 2003).
71
3. Materials and methods
3.1. Data
In this study, multi-annual socio-economic statisti-
cal data, multi-temporal city maps, and two scenes of
satellite multi-spectral image are collected for evalu-
ating the temporal and spatial characteristics of urban
expansion from 1934 to 2001 and the land use land
cover change between 1987 and 2001. The materials
used in this study are listed in Table 1.
3.2. Maps processing
The five maps of different historical periods were
digitalized and put into GIS software (MapInfo5.0).
The maps were geometrically inter-matched and con-
verted to Universal Transverse Mercator map projec-
tion. The topographical map of 1981 was employed as
the base map. The urban area borders in the different
72 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80

Table 1
List of the materials and data used in this research
Data types Year Producer/provider Process Output
Maps
Map of Shimen City (1:70,000) 1934 Department of Digitalization; coordinates Map of urban region in 1934
Defense, Republic of integration
China
Map of Shijiazhuang (1:150,000) 1947 Unknowna Same as above Map of urban region in 1947
Topographical map of 1981 Bureau of Survey and Same as above Map of urban region in 1981
Shijiazhuang (1:100,000) Cartography, Hebei
Land use map of Shijiazhuang 1991 Bureau of Land Same as above; make Map of urban region in 1991;
Prefecture (1:150,000) Resources, Hebei ground truth dataset. Ground truth dataset.
Map of Shijiazhuang city 2001 Shijiazhuang Bureau Same as above Map of urban region in 2001;
(1:10,000) of Urban Planning ground truth dataset.
Satellite images:
Landsat 5 TM 1987/06/29 NASA Geometric correction; Land use and land cover map
Enhancement; in 1987
Classification
Landsat 7 ETM+ 2001/05/10 NASA Same as above Land use and land cover map
in 2001
Socio-economic records:
Annals of land resources of 1992, 1995, Shijiazhuang Bureau – –
Shijiazhuang 1996, 1999 of Land Resources
Annals of economy of Hebei 1978–1998 Hebei Bureau of – –
Province Statistical Affairs
Annual report on environmental 1991, 1994 Shijiazhuang Bureau – –
quality of Shijiazhuang of Environmental
Conservation
Local chronicles of Shijiazhuang – – –
a This map is adopted from Shijiazhuang Urban Planning Bureau, 1994.

periods were determined for calculating the extension
rate. Fig. 2 shows the urban area of Shijiazhuang city
in different historical periods. Use of historical maps to
extract the boundaries of the city to investigate patterns
of urban expansion is relatively simple and can collect
information from the pre-satellite ages. Even though it
might have some potential errors in accuracy, because
the maps have been drawn up with various degrees of
accuracy, the influence of this variability will be mini-
mal due to the relatively coarse time scales used in the
present study.
3.3. Annual urban growth rate
In order to evaluate the spatial distribution of urban
expansion intensity, we adapted an indicator called an-
nual urban growth rate (AGR) for evaluating the ‘ur-
banization’ speed of unit area. AGR is defined as fol-
lows:
UAn+i − UAi
AGR = × 100% (1)
nTAn+i
where TAn + i is the total land area of the target unit
to be calculated at the time point of i + n; UAn + i and
UAi the urban area or built-up area in the target unit
at time i + n and i, respectively, and n is the interval of
the calculating period (in years). Generally, the target-
calculating unit is set to the administrative district so
as to link with administration or economic statistics.
In this research, we preferred the geographical grid-
ding unit since the administrative borders have been
changed so frequently in this city. The maps were there-
fore gridded as 1 km × 1 km units, and the annual urban
growth rates of each unit were then calculated. Lastly,
 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80
Fig. 2. Map of urban area of Shijiazhuang, China in different years. (The railway shows the situation in 2001.)
the grid-based annual urban growth rates were clus-
tered by using natural break method, and mapped to
evaluate the spatial features of the ‘expansion’.
3.4. Satellite image pre-processing
Two scenes of Landsat images were collected for
analyzing land use land cover change between 1987
and 2001. One was Landsat 5 TM image recorded on
June 29, 1987 and the other was Landsat 7 ETM+ image
recorded on May 10, 2001. Both images are cloud free.
First, the image in 1987 was geometrically corrected
to Universal Transverse Mercator map projection sys-
tem. Then the image in 2001 was also geo-encoded and
matched to the TM image with the total RMS error of
less than half-pixel. Both images were filtered with a
3 × 3 median kernel to exclude noise.
3.5. Land use and land cover classification
Before land cover classification, a 9-class classifi-
cation system was designed with consideration of the
land use properties of the study area as urban/built-up,
residential, crop field, vegetable field, forest/trees, or-
73
chard, grass, water body, and barren/sandy lands. The
widely used supervised classification method, Maxi-
mum Likelihood (Murai, 1996), was employed to de-
tect the land cover types. According to the land use map
of 1991 and the large scale map of 2001, we created
two sets of ground truth samples for each image, one
of which used as training data set; the other used as
testing data set for accuracy assessment.
4. Results
4.1. Urban expansion over the past 70 years
The urban area of Shijiazhuang city expanded from
6.31 km2 in 1934 to 165.5 km2 in 2001 at an average
rate of 2.4 km2 /year.
4.1.1. Temporal properties of the urban expansion
Over the past 70 years, the process of urban growth
or urban expansion of Shijiazhuang experienced some
high- and low-speed stages (Fig. 3). The data extracted
from the five historical maps (circles) are consistent
74 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80
Fig. 3. The temporal changes of built area in urban development of
Sijiazhuang, China (+): statistical data; (): map calculation data.
with those from statistical data (cross-line). According
to the multi-annual change of urban area (Fig. 3), ur-
ban expansion of Shijiazhuang can be divided into four
stages as: (1) initial growth stage from 1934 to 1949,
(2) short recovery stage from 1950 to 1955, (3) slow
growth stage from 1956 to 1980, and (4) fast expansion
stage from 1981 to 2001.
During the initial growth stage (1934–1949), urban
areas grew very slowly with an annual speed of around
1.15 km2 /year. During this stage, the city was in its ini-
tial form with a slow natural growth. According to the
Local Chronicles of Shijiazhuang, Shijiazhuang was
appointed as a ‘city ’ in 1925, and it was later con-
structed as a military base in WWII by Japanese troops
and the National Army due to its important position.
The urban growth in 1930s was mainly driven by the
military objectives.
The second stage (1950–1955) was during the re-
covery age with the nation’s reconstruction of ‘new
China’ after WWII and the following civil war. Stable
social environment brought a quick urban growth at the
rate of 3.65 km2 /year.
Unfortunately, after the short recovery growth pe-
riod, from the late of 1950s, the development speed
of the whole country was strongly influenced by po-
litical movements, such as the Great Leap Forward,
a movement led by Chinese Government to attempt
to implement communism through high-speed produc-
tion activities from 1958, and the following Great Cul-
tural Revolution (an important political movement in
China from 1966 to 1976, during which almost all
of the economic activities stopped). Thus, a long pe-
riod of slow growth occurred with a rate of around
0.46 km2 /year. This slow growth situation continued
until the late 1970s.
From the 1980s, China commenced economic re-
form. The urban development of Shijiazhuang had a
great progression. Thus, the period since 1981 is re-
ferred to as ‘fast expansion stage’, which had an an-
nual expansion rate of around 5.6 km2 /year. In the first
10 years, the annual rate of urban expansion reached
3.43 km2 /year due to industrialization. In the second 10
years, expansion was raised to 7.89 km2 /year because
of feasible policies, introduction of a market economy,
and stable socio-economic environments.
4.1.2. Spatial distribution of the urban expansion
intensity
The spatial distributions of urban expansion inten-
sity during the different periods are illustrated by the
index of annual urban growth rate (Fig. 4). On the base
of 1 km × 1 km grid, annual urban growth rate varies
significantly.
During 1934–1947 (Fig. 4a), the mean value of an-
nual urban growth rate was 1.9% with a maximum of
7.2%. Most of the high-speed expansion grids are dis-
tributed at the western part of the city. This is because
of the military usage for barracks and military maga-
zines during the Resistance War against Japan and the
following civil war from the late 1930s to 1947. Par-
ticularly, the railway surrounding the city was used to
transport military materials, and outside of it were de-
fense trenches and walls.
During the long period from 1947 to 1981, the mean
annual urban growth rate was 1.32% with a maximum
of only 2.95 %. The cells with high-speed expansion
are mainly distributed around the old city territory of
1947 (Fig. 4b). The large area of high-speed expan-
sion cells at the east part of the city was for indus-
trial (textile, pharmaceutical, and steel) and residential
use; while the cells at west part were for administra-
tion (Province government) and educational (colleges)
use. In 1950s, the military defense works were dis-
posed of and Shijiazhuang was planned as an impor-
tant textile production base in China due to its good
position in the cotton belt of North China so that more
than 10 large scale textile enterprises were constructed.
Furthermore, the provincial capital of Hebei Province
was moved to Shijiazhuang in 1968 for political
reasons.
From 1981 to 1991 (Fig. 4c), the mean value of
annual urban growth rate was 3% with a maximum of
around 9.75%. High-speed expansion cells are mainly
 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80
Fig. 4. Spatial distributions of annual urban growth rate (AGR) of Shijiazhuang city, China. (The grids are 1 km × 1 km; railway line represents
the situation at the end of each period.)
distributed at the southeast of the city and the North
side of Shi-Tai line, as used for residential, education,
and factories. These expansions can be understood as
natural urban growth due to economic development.
In the last period from 1991 to 2001 (Fig. 4d), the
mean value of annual urban growth rate suddenly rose
to 7.81% with a maximum of 10.1%. Except for the
‘in-filling’ growth at the fringe of old city territory,
most of the high-speed growth cells are ‘out-extension’
growth, which mainly lie on the Northwest and South-
west side for residential and associated use. It seems
that the change of railways in the southwest side has
affected urban growth to some extent in that direction.
The high-speed cells on the east side were used by the
so-called new high-tech district, which has been estab-
lished in most cities throughout China during the 1990s
for attracting overseas investment.
75
4.2. Landscape change in the recent 14 years
In order to evaluate the landscape change due to
high speed urbanization in the recent years, especially
after the Economic Reform from 1980s, two scenes
of TM and ETM+ images were used for land use/land
cover classification as described earlier, and the land
use and land cover change was then detected and
analyzed.
Fig. 5 shows the two land use/land cover classifi-
cation maps. The classification accuracy is assessed
through evaluating the overall classification accuracy
and Kappa statistics, which are calculated according
to the method of Congalton et al. (1983) by using
the two sets of testing datasets. The overall accura-
cies of the classifications are 84.96% and 87.84% in
1987 and 2001, respectively; these indices can meet
76 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80

Fig. 5. The land use and land cover map of Shijiazhuang in (a) 1987 and (b) 2001.
 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80 77

Table 2
The conversion matrix of land use land cover change from 1987 to 2001 (unit: hectare)
1987 2001
Urban Residential Crop lands Vegetable Trees Orchards Water Sandy/bare Grass Total
lands soil
Urban 4977.79 936.72 0.00 20.04 0.00 0.00 30.60 0.00 10.20 5975.4
Residential 3196.61 3216.79 358.92 937.70 4.50 42.29 109.62 0.00 53.10 7919.5
Crop lands 1216.62 1469.25 4805.12 3690.34 23.22 293.31 114.84 1.00 59.62 11673.3
Vegetable 1072.90 985.86 396.54 2034.57 4.32 267.30 88.97 0.00 52.74 4903.2
lands
Trees 120.60 83.52 20.74 103.05 7.02 23.22 30.51 0.00 0.94 389.6
Orchards 202.95 130.77 96.72 1605.73 46.98 734.33 83.88 0.00 84.60 2986.0
Water 30.96 8.06 2.61 11.16 0.00 0.00 16.11 0.00 0.00 68.9
Sandy/bare 25.11 23.94 46.20 102.51 14.26 26.91 2.07 1.00 0.00 242.0
soil
Grass 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 5.00 5.0

Total 10843.5 6854.9 5726.9 8505.1 100.3 1387.4 476.6 2.0 266.2 34162.9
Change 81.47 −13.44 −50.94 73.46 −74.26 −53.54 591.73 −99.17 5220.00 –
rate (%)

the lowest demand for change detection (Lucas et
al., 1989). The Kappa statistics are 0.822 and 0.828,
respectively.
Comparing the two classification maps as demon-
strated in Fig. 5, landscape change is significant: the ur-
ban region is largely broadened; the agricultural lands
have largely decreased; and most part of the windbreak
trees and orchard distributed at the North side are dis-
appeared. Through change detection analysis, the land
use/land cover conversion matrix between 1987 and
2001 was produced (Table 2). Fig. 6 demonstrates the
conversion relationship of some major land use/cover
types. From Fig. 6, we can see the land use/cover con-
version relationship more directly. For example, urban
land change shows a major increase and mainly con-
verted from residential, crop land, and vegetable land
(Fig. 6a). The change of residential land shows that one
big part decreased and changed to urban surface while
another large area increased and changed from crop
land (Fig. 6b). The change of crop land also shows a
decrease and has been converted to urban, residential,
and vegetable land (Fig. 6c). The changes of vegetable
land show a similar situation as that of residential land,
i.e., it is mainly converted from cropland and orchard,
on the other hand, a large part of vegetable land has been
converted for urban use (Fig. 6d). The loss of orchard
has mostly been converted to vegetable land (Fig. 6e).
This may imply that economic returns from vegetable
cultivation are better than that from orchards. The in-
crease in water surface is mainly because a new canal
and some parks were built after 2000 to improve the
urban environment (Fig. 6f). From the land use/cover
conversion matrix table (Table 2), the change rate of
water surface is about 591.7%. At the same time, pub-
lic green land, i.e., grassland, has also largely increased.
The grassland area increased to 266.2 ha in 2001, about
52 times of the grassland area in 1987 (Table 2). Even
though the increase in water surface and grassland was
very fast, the total area of water and grassland is still
rather small; only about 4.2% of the area of urban and
residential land.
The lands converted from residential to urban are
mainly distributed on the outskirts of the old city in
1987 (Fig. 5). This has been caused by the urban ex-
pansion and concentration of housing as the population
also increased significantly during the 14 years to 2001.
The urban lands converted from crop- and vegetable-
lands distributes as circles around the old city terrain in
1987 (Fig. 5). On the other hand, the new increased res-
idential land is mainly as a result of population growth
in suburban region (Fig. 5). As mentioned above, the
increased vegetable lands were mainly converted from
orchard gardens (Fig. 5) in pursuing a higher economic
return, and for the same reasons, many crop lands
around the village were converted to vegetable culti-
vation (Fig. 5).
78 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80

Fig. 6. The conversion relationship between some main land use/cover types. Filled circle line: the changing source of 2001; blank circle line:
the changing destination of 1987. The darker shadow area shows increase of land use/cover; the brighter shadow area shows decrease of land
use/cover.

4.3. Driving factors of the urbanization
Urban expansion and subsequent landscape changes
are governed by geographical and socio-economical
factors, such as population growth, policy, and eco-
nomic development. In most cases, urban expansion
and associated land use/cover changes resulted from
a combination of these factors. For example, socio-
economic policy can strongly affect urban expansion,
and under the changes driven by urban expansion, the
land use patterns of the urban outskirts are altered or
adjusted in pursuit of high economic returns (orchards
or croplands changing to vegetable land).
Even though it is difficult to clarify the influence of
these factors in these changes, their influence is exam-
ined by analyzing the relationships between developed
area (including urban and residential area) and socio-
economic factors, such as, population, industrializa-
tion, traffic conditions, and infrastructure. Fig. 7 shows
the relationships between developed area and these fac-
tors during 1978–1998. The data are collected from the
Economic Annals of Hebei Province (1978–1998). The
population’s growth is a major dominant factor driving
urbanization (Fig. 7a) during the fast expansion stage.
The increase in developed area strongly correlates with
the population’s growth in a linear form (r2 = 0.98). On
the other hand, the improvement of traffic conditions
measured by the annual transport weight also plays
an important role in promoting the urban development
(Fig. 7c). However, the development of gross industrial
products and investment in infrastructure show a more
complex relationship with urban growth (Fig. 7b and
 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80
Fig. 7. The relationships between urban expansion and some socio-economic factors. The transportation amount denotes the weight of transport,
and Yuan is the unit of Chinese currency.
d). 1991 appears to be a turning point in the urban de-
velopment course. Before 1991, or during 1980s, both
the growth of gross industrial products and infrastruc-
tural investment were slow but the increase in devel-
oped area was rapid. On the other hand, the opposite
situation was illustrated after 1991, namely, the gross
industrial products and infrastructural investment grew
rapidly but the increase of developed area was relatively
slow. This fact may imply that the urban expansion be-
fore 1991 was “extensive sprawl” and a large area of
land was just simply urbanized due to new factory es-
tablishments. However, the urban expansion after 1991
contains much more intensive components, such as, the
improvement of infrastructure and city function, the
promotion of industrial technology, and the increase of
service industry.
5. Discussions/conclusions
From the above analysis, the spatial patterns of ur-
ban expansion in Shijiazhuang can be categorized as
three typical types: (1) special objective oriented type
in the war age (1934–1947), whereby the urban ex-
pansion was governed by the establishment of military
base and associated use; (2) socio-political interven-
tion type, i.e., during the ages of Great Leap Forward
and Cultural Revolution. In this period, the urban ex-
79
pansion was strongly affected by the national political
situations; and (3) normal growth type, i.e., the urban
expansion caused by economic development and pop-
ulation growth over the past two decades.
However, as illustrated in the maps of annual urban
growth rate and the land use/cover change in recent
decades, the urban expansion in Shijiazhuang region
differs from some large cities in Asia such as Beijing
and Tokyo, whose spreading trends were along radial
corridors, such as major traffic lines, from the center of
the cities (Liu et al., 2000; Sorensen, 2000), and also
differs from the situation in Shenzhen, China, whose
urban expansion shows a high correlation with the ge-
omorphologic factor (e.g., slope) and the distance to
the Central Business District or major traffic lines (Shi
et al., 2000). The urban expansion of Shijiazhuang city
shows an areal spreading trend around fringes of the ur-
banized territory. This is a very common phenomenon
in the urban development of most cities in China. One
explanation is that the traffic-industrial status deter-
mines this kind of urban growth pattern. Owing in part
to lack of efficient public commuting systems, espe-
cially rail-commuting systems, most of the inhabitants
commute by bicycle. As a result, both the working and
housing places are close each other. The urban devel-
opment of most cities in China follows a similar way
as shown by Shijiazhuang. In this sense, the pattern of
urbanization is determined by technical revolution.
80 J. Xiao et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 75 (2006) 69–80
Acknowledgements
This study was supported by a Hebei Natural Scien-
tific Fund Grant (No. 403163) and one of the authors
(Y. Shen) would like to acknowledge the support from
the research project of Core Research for Evolutional
Science and Technology (CREST) of Japan Science
and Technology Agency and the Key Project of Chi-
nese Academy of Sciences (KZCX2-SW-317/CX10G-
E01-08). The authors gratefully thank two anonymous
reviewers for their valuable advice in improving the
first manuscript.
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