The minimum cost-cycle expansion law of urban spatial morphology: A case study of Kunming in China
城市空间形态的最低成本—周期扩张规律——以昆明为例

The evolution of urban morphology is the changing pattern of urban land use.It is the external morphological outcome of the internal impetus of minimum cost on urban land use model.This paper argues that the process of morphology evolution is the result of alternant pattern of external expansion and internal infilling of land use in urban areas,which is the aufheben conducted by the interweaving behavior between concentration and dissimilation,as well as by the process of embedment and re-embedment of socio-economic action. Based on the above hypothesis,we select the(remote sensing) images of Kunming in temporal serial from 1909 to 2006,using morphological perspective to analyze the changes of urban spatial pattern and explore the evolution of urban morphology.The results are revealed that:(1) from the view of the rational micro-process and macro-process,in general,the evolution of urban morphology follows the pattern of the minimum cost-cyclic expansion in the statistics;(2) based on the minimum cost-cyclic expansion model,the core mechanism that drives the morphology of periodic changes is based on the impact between alternant pro-growth infrastructure investment and pro-consumption public investment infrastructure changes,as well as factor substitution effects in each spatial phase.