Examine Urban Expansion From Remote Sensing and Gis: A Case Study in Beijing

This paper integrates remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) technologies to study urban expansion in Beijing, China. This research attempts to explore how socio-economic factors affect urban land cover changes, and to test out a new approach (the Gray Relation Analysis based on RS/GIS) to study possible relationships between the physical changes and the socio-economic characteristics of urban expansion. The Beijing case study indicates that the City of Beijing is expanding at increasingly rates, which have been attributed to the socioeconomic factors, such as, Housing Construction, Non-agricultural Population in Rural Area, Infrastructure Investment, Total Population Increase, and Social Fixed Assets Investment in a descending order.