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Accurately and timely quantifying the dynamics of urban sprawl is essential for improving land use efficiency and land use planning. However, existing research mainly focused on the sprawl of a single city or urban agglomerations in China, while national scale studies mainly used short-term remote sensing data to quantify urban sprawl. Therefore, we still lack a long term and most up-to-date understanding of urban sprawl in China, especially in different regions, cities of different sizes. Here, we quantified the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban sprawl using urban sprawl index (USI) based on the latest population census, and analyzed its driving force in China during 2000 ~ 2020 using the optimal parameters-based geographical detector. The results showed that in the past two decades, Chinese cities were still experiencing urban sprawl, with an average USI of 3.04, indicating that the average annual growth rate of urban lands was 3.04% higher than that of the urban population. Overall, the sprawl showed a slowdown, with the USI dropping from 3.55 in 2000 ~ 2010 to 2.53 in 2010 ~ 2020. Among regions, urban sprawl was more severe in the western region, where the USI was 5.33 during 2000 ~ 2020 and 89.3% of the cities exceeded the national average sprawl speed. Recently, the driving force of transportation on urban sprawl substantially increased. In the future, the Territorial Spatial Planning should pay attention to confining excessive sprawl of small- and medium-sized cities in the western region of China.
Hou et al. (Fri,) studied this question.