Spatio-Temporal Characteristics of Urban Compactness in the Golden Triangle of Southern Fujian Province, China

During the last 40 years, China has experienced a large-scale urbanization process. The rapid expansion of urban land has brought a series of negative resource, environment and ecological effects to China. A compact development of the city is needed, in order to use land resources more efficiently and avoid the negative environmental impact of urban expansion. The purpose of a compact city is to achieve efficient use of urban space and promote social and cultural diversity through the use of moderately high-density and land-use functions, and to provide sustainable benefits to its residents. In this paper, the compactness of urban spatial in the Golden Triangle of Southern Fujian Province is measured, and the spatial-temporal characteristics of it in 2012, 2015 and 2017 are analyzed by normalized compactness index NCI, largest patch index LPI, landscape shape index LSI, mean shape index SHAPE_MN and perimeter-area fractal dimension PAFRAC. The research shows that the compactness of the urban agglomeration of the Golden Triangle of Southern Fujian Province in China is not high, but it shows an upward trend. Among them the compactness of Xiamen is greater than that of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The larger the city scale, the higher the compactness, the more complex the shape. The evolutionary law of spatial compactness of the Golden Triangle of Southern Fujian province in six years, revealed in this study, can guide its future spatial development mode. In addition to measuring urban form compactness, urban function compactness is also an important part. In the future, the measurement of urban function compactness will become the focus of our attention, so as to realize the sustainable development of cities.