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| RESEARCH ON URBAN SPATIAL EXPANSION BASED ON ENERGY CONTRAST OF RURAL AND URBAN AREAS——A Case Study of Wuxi City |
| YANG Shan, CHEN Sheng, ZHANG Zhen-jie |
| School of Geographical Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210046, China |
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Abstract Urban space expands to rural areas unceasingly along with rapid urbanization, and the essence of this expansion is the spatial reflection on rural and urban energy interaction in rural-urban fringes, and in this paper the rural-urban energy is the intensity that rural-urban essential factors exert on rural-urban fringes. Taking Wuxi as a case study, this paper adopts the statistical energy analysis applicable to complex systems as a means of quantitative analysis and builds an energy measurement model. After measuring the rural-urban factor energy and synthetic energy of Wuxi in the years of 1984、1991、1997、2001、2005, we have found that the major orientation of urban spatial expansion does not stretch towards the direction of places of good locations and a superior urban nature but towards the direction of places of an obvious rural nature in the rural-urban fringes. The small towns within the rural-urban fringes, together with the urban central areas, have become the important driving forces in urban spatial expansion which promotes the urban factors into the rural areas. Through calculating unit's areas of high, middle, low urban energy in various times, it is possible to see that the high value areas rapidly increased from 1984 to 1997, and then slowly increased, and even decreased from 1997; the middle value areas temperately increased all time; and the low value areas became negatively increased from rapid-increasing in the beginning. Finally we find that, firstly the main direction of urban spatial expansion is not the direction of good location conditions and superior urban nature but the direction of obvious rural nature in urban-rural transition region. Secondly the small towns become the important role in promoting urban factor into rural areas with the central city zone.
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Received: 26 September 2008
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2009, Vol. 24 
