Monitoring and analysis of China's integrated city development based on remote sensing: A case study of Guangfo city

Regional synergy is seen as an advanced form of coordinating the social economy and maintaining competitiveness in today's global competition system. Since China's reform and development, under the background of rapid urbanization and regional coordinated development, cities with geographical proximity and close economic and social ties have gradually formed a new mode of urban development, which is called integrated city. As a new phenomenon in the process of China's urbanization, the existing research mainly focuses on the typical case studies, and the research methods are mostly limited to literature review and theoretical analysis. Therefore, in this paper, the Guangfo city (the most representative case in China, resulting from the integration of Guangzhou and Foshan cities) was selected as research objective. Specifically, the work analyses the transitional zone of the integrated city, based on multi-spectral Landsat 8 and nighttime light NPP/VIIRS images, focusing on landuse conversion, block light fluctuation and light gravity center migration. In the analyzed period (2013-2017), results highlight significant spatial heterogeneity in the integration level of Guangfo city's development. Moreover, the combined analysis of nighttime light and urban expansion in the boundary zone shows that the enhancement effect of construction land expansion on nighttime light is increasing with the development of integration, and the inhibition effect of vegetation cover on nighttime light intensity is weakening. The proposed approach applied to integrated city research and achieved results can potentially support decision-making and planning in the process of urban development. © 2019 SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.