The migration of population from rural areas to urban areas is a common phenomenon in developing countries (DC). The recent industrialization and the consequent urban development have already caused a strong deterioration of the rural peri-urban areas where it was usual to practice small-scale agriculture with high water demand. Not only pollution has to be prevented, but plans have to be developed for the optimal siting of new settlements in order to optimize water management and land use and to reduce sanitary risks. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop new efficient technological tools to support decisions in planning the urban development in order to keep the rural-urban interface reasonably healthy.
This paper presents an application of state-of-the-art geographical information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) technology in a pilot study area in the People’s Republic of China for the detection, comprehension, and simulation of land cover changes in economically fast-growing areas. China is particularly interesting for this kind of applications since its legislation was modified at the end of August of 2001 allowing free access to cities by the rural population. This may lead to one of the largest migrations in human history — forecasts estimate that more than 600 million people will move from rural areas to urban areas in the next 25 years. The pilot study was conducted on Hainan Island. The data for measuring the urban expansion and the land-use/land-cover changes were obtained from satellite imagery. The results show that the integration of GIS and RS with cellular automata and neural networks can provide neural models capable of evaluating the urban devel?opment and its impacts on the rural-urban interfaces.