The development of urbanization has a close relationship with fresh water resources, especially in the rapid urbanization period. By analyzing the course of the urbanization development and the experience of international ur banization development, the paper confirms the starting time of the rapid urbanization. Based on the ecological theo ry, urban fresh water consumption is composed of three types: the direct, the indirect and the induced water consump tion. And the paper constructs calculation model of the indirect and the induced water consumption. Using the related statistics data, the paper makes an empirical research on the changes of the amount and structure of water consumption. Then it discusses the correlation between the water consumption and the amount of urban population, and the result shows that the amount of the water consumption and the urban population have a remarkable correlation with the exception of the amount of the indirect water consumption, and the curves take on quadratic function form. Last, from the urban function point of view, the paper anatomizes the cause of the urban water consumption changes.
Modern cities and towns play as the central places of wealth accumulation for human-being, not only in the ways of settlement and material consumption as they were traditionally in ancient time, but also in the ways of social production and environmental pollution as they are mostly today. With such a transition, the meaning of land use for urbanization has broadened. According to the rule of human ecosystem, land use for modern urbanization can be divided into three types: namely, the direct, the indirect and the induced. However, its structure follows its own way of the direct < the indirect < the induced, rather different from what it normally happens in the natural ecosystem. This paper takes China as an example, calculates the evolution of the land used by cities and towns during 1952-2005 according to statistics, and then analyzes the evolvement of the structure. At last, it puts forward several countermeasures to ensure land resource requirement for urbanization in future.
