Modeling Urban Spatial Expansion Considering Population Migration Interaction in Ezhou, Central China

Abstract

Against the background of rapid social and economic reform, urban space systems are unceasingly reconstituted. Population migration, which is a popular social phenomenon, has become an important driving force affecting China’s urbanization and regional spatial restructuring. However, the previous studies on urban spatial expansion focused more on socioeconomic influences, seldom paying attention to population migration interaction. In this context, this paper proposes an integrated urban spatial expansion model considering the population interaction (UEMCPI) to simulate the collaborative development process of an urban area. The UEMCPI model combines multiple models with cellular automata (CA) to obtain the population migration interaction in a spatially explicit way and embeds the interaction into transition rule of the CA model. Ezhou, a typical city in central China, was taken as a case study to conduct the simulation of urban spatial expansion. The results show that population migration interaction plays an indispensable role in modeling urban spatial expansion, and the proposed UEMCPI model has better performance in simulating a collaborative urban development. The prediction indicates a continuous expansion of urban land in Ezhou through 2022, especially in certain new districts that have been delimited by regional planning. A polycentric urban development of the city of Ezhou will be highlighted in the future. More attention should be paid to population migration for guiding regional sustainable development.