Exploring the interactive coupled relationship between urban construction and resource environment in Wuhan, China

Megacities are facing internal and external constraints and challenges with the accelerated urbanization. Urbanization can provide convenient and various infrastructures for people, but on the other hand, natural resource and environmental condition will be destroyed due to plenty of land resources used for city development. Nowadays, it is important to keep the balance between urban construction and resource and environment, In order to measure the relationship and how these two factors impact each other, this study took the largest megacity of central China–Wuhan as an example to explore the status of urbanization through a comprehensive analysis framework, and quantify the coupling mechanism and spatial autocorrelation on street level. Through the indicator system, bivariate autocorrelation model, coupling coordination model and spatial lag model (SLM), the main conclusions are listed in the following part. With the increasing distance to the city center, the secondary indicators showed a significant increase in natural resources. Relationship between social economy and regional construction had an obvious overall positive correlation with high aggregation and strong spatial heterogeneity. Streets with lag effects on urban development ability were obviously larger than streets with lag effects on resource and environment level, which means most streets still have potential in terms of resource and environmental supply when compared with the level of urbanization. The results from SLM confirmed that the effects of spatial aggregation can improve both urban development ability and resource and environment level. This study can provide detailed geographical information for policymakers in the development of megacities and surrounding areas based on their urbanization status.