For almost three decades, China has been undergoing significant transition from a planned economy to a market economy. Fast-paced economic growth and urbanization, interacting with market-oriented reforms in land re- sources allocation, have caused profound spatial restructuring of Chinese cities. This paper examines urban expansion and land use reconfiguration in Shanghai’s central city from 1979 to 2002, with a special focus on the effect of the adoption of the land-leasing system in 1988. The empirical research, which employs GIS-based spatial analysis tech- niques to explore land use data for multiple years, indicates fundamental changes in the spatial characteristics of urban development in Shanghai after this important land policy reform.
We used the maps of urban land-use in 1978, 1991, 1994, 2000 and 2004, and softwares such as ArcGIS, Fragstats to analyze the spatio-temporal process of urban residential space quantitatively. Some methods, such as di- rection analysis and landscape pattern analysis, were employed. The results show that: 1) the residential land grew very rapidly in Hefei from 1978 to 2004, and the increased land was distributed mainly in the central city zone surrounded by a moat; however, after 1994, it was distributed mainly outside the 1th Ring Road; 2) the expansion speeds were very different in different directions: there exists a fastest expansion of residential land in the directions of NE-NNE, SW and SSE, and a slowest one in the directions of E and SEE; 3) the residential land growth went through four stages: slow circular expansion in 1978-1991, 'axes + fan wings' expansion in 1991-1994, more rapid circular expansion in 1994-2000 and 'fan-wings' expansion in 2000-2004; 4) the expansion intensity was also different in all directions in the period of 1978 to 1994, and the most was in SW and then NW; and 5) there were more and more residential land area, and the spatial agglomeration was improved increasingly.
