Detecting Land Use Changes in a Rapidly Developing City during 1990–2017 Using Satellite Imagery : A Case Study in Hangzhou Urban Area, China

As one of the rapidly-developing mega cities in China, Hangzhou has experienced great land use change during the past three decades. By analyzing land use change in designated period, it is beneficial to understand urbanization process in Hangzhou, and undertake further urban management and urban planning. In this study, the land use change from 1990 to 2017 in Hangzhou urban area was detected by a method of supervised classification with Landsat TM images from 1990, 1997, 2004, 2010 and 2017, and analyzed by a Markov matrix. The results show that from 1990 to 2017, a great deal of rural areas transformed into built up areas in the Hangzhou urban area. Consequently, the urban area of Hangzhou increased eight times over the period from 1990 to 2017. This may imply that such a change should be directly related to the Chinese government policy, of which the main factor is rapidly-developing urbanization in China, such as in Hangzhou. Thus, it is believed that China's land use change is going to be small in the following decades. This may indicate that China's urban construction is slowing down, while its urban planning is being shifted from construction to management.