Urban growth in Tianjin, 1993–2003 Liu Yun September, 2004 Urban growth in Tianjin, 1993–2003 by Liu Yun Thesis submitted to the International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in ………………………… (fill in the name of the course) Thesis Assessment Board Prof. Dr. D. Webster (Chairman) Prof. Dr. H.F.L. Ottens (external examiner, University Utrecht) Prof. (Douglas) Webster (First ITC supervisor) MSc. R.V. (Richard) Sliuzas (Second ITC supervisor) Mrs Du-Ningrui Msc (SUS supervisor) INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR GEO-INFORMATION SCIENCE AND EARTH OBSERVATION ENSCHEDE, THE NETHERLANDS I certify that although I may have conferred with others in preparing for this assignment, and drawn upon a range of sources cited in this work, the content of this thesis report is my original work. Signed ……… Liu Yun ……………. Disclaimer This document describes work undertaken as part of a programme of study at the International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation. All views and opinions expressed therein remain the sole responsibility of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of the institute. Abstract Chinese cities have experienced a period of rapid urban expansion since the socialist market economic was approved in 1993. The urbanization level increased from 28% in 1993 to 40% in year 2003. As a metropolitan with the third largest population in China, Tianjin city also has made the rapid urban growth under this macro background. Here Tianjin is chosen as the case city to know what is going on about urban development in Chinese big. Furthermore, since the urban growth is inseparable from the urban development policies set by local government such as the master plan, Tianjin’s master plan made in 1995 and the deviation between the real situation and master plan were discussed in this the- sis. In this thesis, the first section is to image the urban physical growth during the period 1993-2003. It is the foundation to know the actual change in study period. Subsequently, the growth analysis is made respectively on both socio-economic and physical aspect. Lastly, awareness of the local policy on ur- ban physical growth and a mainly qualitative evaluation of it are made. This study uses Landsat TM, Spot, Aster images and the techniques of GIS and Remote Sensing im- age interpretation and change detection to review the spatial-temporal urban expansion in Tianjin from 1993 to 2003. The image from 1993, 2000 and 2003 are used to derive information on urban land use in study area. Both visual interpretation and supervised classification are used separately to extract land cover in different images. The method of post-classification was used to detect the physi- cal changes during 10 years. The combined use of GIS and RS describes the overall physical changes of the study area. It shows that both Tianjin city proper and other city areas such as Tanggu all expand at a high speed. The socio-economic development is realized at the metropolitan level, as well as district level, mainly by the increase of population, GDP/per capita GDP, industrial structure and FDI basing on the avail- able data.. While the urban physical growth analysis is done from the perspective of district level, transportation influence, physical form and land use efficiency respectively. Concretely, the growth occurred in each district, orientation, as well as along each main road and corridor is analyzed to un- derstand its temporal-spatial allocation in study area. A further analysis is done joining these two as- pects such as the land use efficiency and this partially reveals that there exists some extent of rational- ity of the real distribution of the new urban land, and also reveals the disadvantage of the actual change. The local urban development policy can be concluded into five aspects respectively relating to the city proper, distribution of industrial land, coastal new districts, peripheral urban conglomeration near city proper and the physical form of the urban system. The assessment of the policy is made by the com- parison of the actual change and what the policy expects on each aspect. Basically, the real situation corresponds with the policy expectation, suggesting that the policy effectively lead to the real devel- opment of urban growth especially on economy. But there is also strong challenge to realize the ex- pectation of the urban physical form in study area because the actual growth is so fast that the occur- rence in some places contradicts official physical plans inevitably. For example, the current pattern of growth in the middle zone between city proper and Tanggu city area/ Dagang city area directly con- tradicts the official policy, which advocates controlling the physical development except a few spots, and especially keeping interval between each main urban development spot along the line from city proper to Tanggu city area. Acknowledgements Now the thesis is ready for my Master Degree in the International Institute for Geo-information Sci- ence and the Earth Observation (ITC) in the Netherlands. It’s time to express my deepest gratitude to all the people who have supported and helped me in the completion of this research work. First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Mr. Webster Douglas and Mr. Richard Sliuzas, Especially to Mr. Richard for his effective guidance, supervision, encouragement and support. He was always patient with me and gave me construction suggestions. He taught me how to formalize ideas and thesis. I am very grateful for his invaluable comments on the structure and con- tent of this thesis, which has considerably improved its quality and readability. I also want to thank my SUS supervisor, Mr. Huang-Zhengdong and Xiao-Yinghui, especially thank for their patient instructions before mid-term assessment. They supervised me to organize the frame- work of this thesis and process the image data. Furthermore, thanks to Mrs Du-Ningrui and Mr. Cheng-Jianquan for their great help in doing this research, their professional comments gave me a lot of help during the course of thesis writing. Thanks to all members of staff involved in the UPLA programme. I also want to show special thanks to the SUS of Wuhan University for the opportunity to pursue this master programme. I thank my supervisor in China, Mrs. Zhou-Jie, for her kindness and great support. I appreciate with great joy all the Chinese people and all the friends in ITC. They have given me nu- merous helps, happiness and beautiful memories in the Six months in ITC. I am grateful for every- thing together with you. Best wishes for you and your family. Also I want to thank all my dearest classmates and friends for their great company both in Wuhan and in ITC in this six months journey. Special thanks and deeply gratitude are to my dear mother, my elder sisters and their families for their constant support, understanding and love. Also thanks to my nephew, I wish my work could encour- age him to study hard. Finally, I dedicate this thesis to my dear parents. I can’t finish my thesis at all without their love. Table of contents Abstract Acknowledgement Table of contents List of figures List of tables 1. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1. Background and problem statement 1 1.1.1. Urban definition and city administrative hierarchy in China 2 1.1.2. The general situation of the land use in Chinese cities today 2 1.1.3. The significance of study the urban growth 3 1.2. Research aim and objectives 4 1.2.1. Research aim and main objectives 4 1.2.2. Sub-objectives 4 1.3. Research questions 4 1.4. Case study Tianjin, China 4 1.5. Research methodology 7 1.5.1. Key definitions 7 1.5.2. Data availability 7 1.5.3. Data processing and analysis 8 1.6. Workflow 9 1.7. Structure of the Thesis 9 2. PATTERNS OF URBANIZATION 11 2.1. Types of urbanized regions 11 2.1.1. The city-region 11 2.1.2. Conurbation 11 2.1.3. The urban field 11 2.1.4. Megalopolis 11 2.1.5. Ecumenopolis 12 2.2. Key Features of the Urban System in modern China 12 2.2.1. Low Urban Concentration 12 2.2.2. The Hukou System. 12 2.2.3. Transformation of the Urban System in China 14 2.2.4. Urban Specialization and Manufacturing Agglomeration 14 2.2.5. Governance 15 2.3. Housing and land markets in China 15 2.3.1. Establishment of housing market 15 2.3.2. Establishment of land market 16 2.3.3. Impacts on urban growth 17 2.4. Urbanization and urban policy since 1978 18 2.4.1. Urbanization since 1978 in China 18 2.4.2. Urban policy since 1978 19 2.4.3. Current strategy for urban development 22 3. IMAGE DATA PROCESSING AND METHODOLOGY 24 3.1. Introduction of the development of Satellite RS Technology 24 3.1.1. Landsat 24 3.1.2. Spot 24 3.1.3. Aster 25 3.2. Description of the three images 25 3.3. Image processing work flow 26 3.4. Geometric correction of the images 26 3.4.1. Introduction to geometric correction 26 3.4.2. Steps of geometric correction 27 3.5. Definition of the boundary of the study area. 28 3.6. Land cover classification 28 3.6.1. Introduction to image classification 28 3.6.2. Image classification in this thesis 31 3.6.3. Visual interpretation 34 3.6.4. Verification of Classification Accuracy 36 3.6.5.