Assessing multi-spatial driving factors of urban land use transformation in megacities: a case study of Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area from 2000 to 2018

Rapid morphological and socioeconomic changes have accelerated the urbanization process and urban land use transformation in China. Megacities comprise clusters of urban cities and exhibit both newly formed and well-developed urban land use development beyond administrative boundaries. It is necessary to distinguish the changing effects of spatial-varying driving factors on newly formed urban land uses from well-developed built-up areas in megacities. This study proposed a multi-spatial urbanization framework to quantify region-level socioeconomics, cluster-level ecological morphologies, and grid-level urban functional morphologies. A three-level Bayesian hierarchical model was developed to investigate the impacts of multi-spatial driving factors on urban land use transformation in megacities. The study period focused on the urbanization process between 2000 and 2018 in Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). Results revealed that compared with well-developed urban built-up land, changing impacts of three-level driving factors in urban land use transformation could be captured based on the proposed Bayesian hierarchical model. The region-level total population was associated with increasing possibilities in forming new residential land than the well-developed ones in 35 districts/counties/cities in GBA. Cluster-level ecological attributes with higher proportion, lower edge density of urban built areas, and lower-degree ecological complexity showed increasing probability on newly formed industrial and public land. Grid-level urban functional factors including public transportation density and shopping/dining distribution exhibited significantly decreasing probability (coefficients: −2.12 to −0.51) on contributing newly formed land uses compared with the well-developed areas, whereas business/industry distribution represented higher (coefficients: 0.99 and 0.15) and lower probabilities (coefficient: −0.22) of forming industrial/public land and residential land separately. This research shows a new attempt to distinguish multi-spatial morphological and socioeconomic effects in urban land use transformation in megacities.