Open Journal of Social Sciences, 2019, 7, 176-188 
https://www.scirp.org/journal/jss 
ISSN Online: 2327-5960 
ISSN Print: 2327-5952 
 
 
 
Research on the Development of “Ghost City” 
Based on Night Light Data: Taking Sichuan 
Province as an Example 
Qiqi Zeng1, Wenjun Zhang2 
1School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang, China 
2School of Environment and Resources, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang, China 
 
 
 
How  to  cite  this  paper:  Zeng,  Q.Q.  and 
Zhang, W.J. (2019) Research on the Devel-
opment  of  “Ghost  City”  Based  on  Night 
Light Data: Taking Sichuan Province as an 
Example. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 
7, 176-188. 
https://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2019.712013 
 
Received: November 17, 2019 
Accepted: December 6, 2019 
Published: December 9, 2019 
 
Copyright © 2019 by author(s) and   
Scientific Research Publishing Inc. 
This work is licensed under the Creative 
Commons Attribution International   
License (CC BY 4.0). 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/     
Open Access
 
 
 
Abstract 
Due to the improvement of urbanization level and unreasonable development 
in China, many cities have begun to appear as “Ghost City”; that is, the phe-
nomenon of high vacancy rate and low occupancy rate in urban areas. The 
emergence of this phenomenon will seriously affect the healthy development 
of cities. Therefore, the monitoring and analysis of the urban “Ghost City” index 
is of great significance to urban population and urban construction. This paper 
uses Landsat8 remote sensing image data, night light remote sensing image 
data, and resident population data of various cities and counties in Sichuan 
Province  to  calculate  the  “Ghost  City”  index,  and  obtains  the  “Ghost  City” 
Index  of  prefecture-level  cities  and  county-level  cities  in  Sichuan  Province. 
Based on the judgment criteria of the Ghost City, the calculation results show 
that three cities have become “Ghost City” within the research scope; eight ci-
ties have a tendency to develop into “Ghost City”; the rest of the cities have 
developed well and there has not been a “Ghost City” phenomenon. Accord-
ing to this conclusion, this paper studies the similarities and differences be-
tween the cities that are the ghost towns or the cities with the development 
trend of ghost towns, analyzes the reasons for the formation of ghost towns 
and  makes  suggestions  for  the  urbanization  of  Sichuan  Province,  and  pro-
vides reference for the direction of urban development and rational planning. 
 
Keywords 
Urbanization, DMSP/OLS, “Ghost City” Index, Light Gray Value 
1. Introduction 
Since the reform and opening-up, China’s urbanization has increased, and the 
176 
Open Journal of Social Sciences 
 
DOI: 10.4236/jss.2019.712013    Dec. 9, 2019 
 
Q. Q. Zeng, W. J. Zhang 
 
urbanization process has gradually accelerated, and the demand for housing has 
also risen sharply. The National Urban Land Use Data Summary Results Analy-
sis  Report  [1]  mentioned  that  the  national  urban  land  area  increased  by  1.65 
million hectares in 2009-2014, with an average annual growth rate of 4.2%, indi-
cating that urban construction land is increasing in a large amount. The devel-
opment and unreasonable development of the city led to the emergence of emp-
ty cities or ghost cities, that is, the phenomenon of high housing vacancy rate 
and low occupancy rate [2]. 
Due to the insufficient monitoring of the dynamic changes of urban popula-
tion information, the phenomenon of “Ghost City” has appeared one after anoth-
er. The emergence of this phenomenon has seriously affected the development of 
the city and restricted the advancement of urbanization, resulting in the waste of 
land  resources  and  weakening  urban  operational  efficiency.  The  criterion  for 
“Ghost City” is that the ratio of urban population to built-up area is less than 0.5 
or slightly higher than 0.5 (the standard is based on the land occupation stan-
dard from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the built-up 
area  per  square  kilometer  holds  10,000  people),  this  criterion  known  as  the 
“Ghost City” Index. This study takes Sichuan Province as an example, combined 
with  the  2013  Landsat8  OLI_TIRS  and  DMSP/OLS  night-time  remote  sensing 
image data, through the fitting of the urban population and the extraction of the 
built-up area, to achieve the city-level and county-level cities in Sichuan Prov-
ince. The analysis and monitoring of the “Ghost City” index, and through the 
analysis of the reasons for the formation of the ghost city phenomenon, propose 
corresponding countermeasures, and provide the basis  for urban development 
and planning. 
2. Research Scope and Data 
2.1. Research Scope 
Sichuan Province has complex landforms and has four types of landforms: moun-
tains, hills, plains and plateaus. Therefore, this paper selects Sichuan Province as 
the research scope and provides reference for the study of ghost cities in other 
cities in China. Sichuan governs 18 prefecture-level cities, 3 autonomous prefec-
tures, 17 county-level cities,  108 counties, and 4  autonomous counties. In this 
study, only 18 prefecture-level cities and 17 county-level cities were selected as 
research areas analysis (Figure 1) and monitoring of the “Ghost City” index in 
Sichuan Province. 
2.2. Data Sources 
1) Luminous remote sensing image data. The night-time remote sensing im-
age  data  used  in  this  paper  is  from  the  National  Geophysical  Data  Center 
(https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/dmsp/downloadV4composites.html) and is de-
fined by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. The Operational Lines-
can System (hereinafter referred to as OLS) on the linear scanning service system   
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Open Journal of Social Sciences 
 
DOI: 10.4236/jss.2019.712013 
 
Q. Q. Zeng, W. J. Zhang 
 
 
Figure 1. Research scope. 
 
(DMSP) was taken in 2013. In this paper, the data of the night light in Sichuan 
Province extracted by the study is 0 - 63, the saturated light gray value is 63, and 
the spatial resolution is 1km (Note: Due to the DMSP/OLS luminous remote sens-
ing image data on the National Geophysical Data Center website as of 2013, the 
research data selected in this paper is the 2013 data). 
2) Landsat8 OLI_TIRS remote sensing image data. The satellite imagery cov-
ering the whole region of Sichuan Province was selected in 2013. The data comes 
from the Geospatial Data Cloud Platform of the Computer Network Information 
Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (http://www.gscloud.cn). 
3) Population data of city-level and county-level cities at various levels. From 
the China Statistics Information Network (http://www.tjcn.org/). 
4) Other auxiliary data. It mainly includes vector administrative boundaries at 
the national, provincial, municipal, and county levels in China. 
3. Data Processing 
3.1. DMSP/OLS Data Processing 
In order to obtain the remote sensing image data of the study area, the obtained 
DMSP/OLS luminous remote sensing image data is tailored according to the ad-
ministrative boundary vector data of Sichuan Province, and the DMSP data of 
various cities and county-level cities in Sichuan Province are obtained (Figure 2). 
3.2. Extraction of Urban Built-up Areas of Landsat8 OLI_TIRS Data 
The Landsat data of the studied cities were analyzed, and the land use data in-
cluding the use of construction land, forest land and water bodies were obtained.   
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Open Journal of Social Sciences 
 
DOI: 10.4236/jss.2019.712013 
 
Q. Q. Zeng, W. J. Zhang 
 
 
Figure 2. DMSP data of various cities and county-level cities in Sichuan Province. 
 
The important basis for assessing the level of urban development is urban con-
struction land. Researchers at home and abroad have made a lot of research on 
the  extraction  of  urban  construction  land.  Among  them,  Xu  Hanqiu  [3]  pro-
posed to use the IBI building land index to extract urban built-up areas from re-
mote sensing images. Accuracy can reach more than 96%. The IBI building land 
index  can  be  constructed  by  the  three  indexes  of  normalized  building  index 
NDBI, vegetation cover index NDVI and improved normalized water body in-
dex MNDWI. 
Calculation formula as follows: 
(
(
=
MNDWI
NDVI
NDBI
=
=
+
−
B6 B5 B6 B5
)
)
B3 B6 B3 B6
B5 B4 B5 B4
(
) (
) (
) (
−
+
−
                                          (1) 
                                          (2) 
)
                                        (3) 
+
Among them, B3, B4, B5 and B6 are the green band, the red band, the near- 
infrared band, and the SWIR1 band of the Landsat8 OLI_TIRS image. 
The IBI building land index formula is as follows: 
)
)
NDBI NDVI MNDWI 2
NDBI NDVI MNDWI 2
IBI
+
+
−
+
(
(
=
                                  (4) 
Substituting  the  Equation  (1),  Equation  (2),  Equation  (3)  into  the  Equation 
(4), the finishing can be obtained: 
(
(
(
2 B6 B5 B6 B5
(
2 B6 B5 B6 B5
) (
) (
IBI
+
+
−
+
−
−
)
)
=
B5 B4 B5 B4
B5 B4 B5 B4
+
+
−
−
) (
) (
)
)
−
+
(
(
B3 B6 B3 B6
B3 B6 B3 B6
−
−
+
+
) (
) (
)
)
  (5) 
Due to space limitations, the processing results of all prefecture-level cities and 
county-level cities cannot be displayed. Only the construction land and built-up 
areas extracted by the IBI index of Mianyang City are displayed here, as shown 
in Figure 3 and Figure 4. 
4. Research Ideas and Methods 
The research process of this paper for the ghost city index (Figure 5) is as fol-
lows: 
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Open Journal of Social Sciences 
 
DOI: 10.4236/jss.2019.712013 
 
Q. Q. Zeng, W. J. Zhang 
Figure 3. Mianyang City construction land extracted by IBI index.   
 
Figure 4. Mianyang City built-up area. 
 
 
 
 
 
Figure 5. Research process. 
 
Note: The study obtained the population of the population by analyzing the 
population and lighting data of various cities and counties in Sichuan Province, 
and extracted the built-up area of Landsat8 OLI_TIRS data with relevant soft-
ware to obtain the ghost city index of Sichuan Province. The data involved in 
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Open Journal of Social Sciences 
 
DOI: 10.4236/jss.2019.712013 
 
Q. Q. Zeng, W. J. Zhang 
 
this study may have certain errors due to the difficulty of obtaining. It is only for 
the study of the ghost city index method, and the data will be continuously im-
proved in future research. 
4.1. Population Spatialization 
The administrative boundary vector data of Sichuan Province is overlapped with 
the night light remote sensing image, and the DMSP/OLS data of each city and 
county level city is obtained through the cropping in the GIS data management 
tool,  and  the  data  of  night  light  intensity  greater  than  6  is  obtained  through 
attribute extraction, and after extraction, the data is extracted. The light intensity 
distribution is shown in Figure 6. After obtaining the data of night light intensi-
ty greater than 6 in various cities and counties, use the zoning statistics function 
to calculate the sum of the light gray values of the nighttime lighting data of each 
city and county level (Table 1, Figure 7). 
Many scholars have confirmed that the spatial distribution of population has a 
certain correlation with nighttime lighting data. This paper will fit and analyze 
the sum of the light intensity and the resident population of 18 prefecture-level 
cities and 17 county-level cities in Sichuan (Figure 8). In the figure, the sum of 
the light intensity values of each city is X, and the number of permanent resi-
dents in each city is Y. 
 
Figure 6. DMSP data with a light intensity greater than 6.   
 
 
 
DOI: 10.4236/jss.2019.712013 
 
Figure 7. DMSP partition statistics. 
 
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Open Journal of Social Sciences 
Q. Q. Zeng, W. J. Zhang 
 
Table 1. The sum of the light gray values of the Prefecture-level city and County-level 
cities. 
Number  Prefecture-level 
city 
The sum of the light gray 
values 
County-level 
city 
The sum of the light gray 
values 
1 
2 
3 
4 
5 
6 
7 
8 
9 
10 
11 
12 
13 
14 
15 
16 
17 
18 
Zigong 
Luzhou 
Ya’an 
Dazhou 
Yibin 
Suining 
Nanchong 
Ziyang 
Neijiang 
Guang’an 
Bazhong 
Leshan 
Mianyang 
Deyang 
Meishan 
Panzhihua 
Chengdu 
Guangyuan 
Source: Author self-painting. 
 
9030 
10,281 
2835 
7789 
12,647 
12,078 
17,385 
7026 
9780 
8266 
6779 
16,604 
28,371 
21,901 
14,333 
22,618 
178,623 
19,091 
Guanghan 
Wanyuan 
Xichang 
Jiangyou 
Dujiangyan 
Jianyang 
Longchang 
Chongzhou 
Langzhong 
Huaying 
Qionglai 
Emeishan 
Pengzhou 
Maerkang 
Mianzhu 
Shifang 
Kangding 
 
18,012 
1313 
15,436 
11,139 
13,323 
5566 
4178 
12,724 
7771 
2206 
6271 
7266 
15,973 
1265 
10,371 
8421 
4061 
 
According to Figure 8, the matching of the city’s light intensity value with the 
resident population has a good effect. Therefore, the population quantity infor-
mation extracted by real-time remote sensing data is scientific and accurate. The 
urban population is obtained by fitting the regression equation. The calculation 
formula of the urban population Num1 of the prefecture-level city and the urban 
population of the county-level city is as follows: 
Num1 0.005 DN
1954.13
                                                  (6) 
=
×
DN
                                                  (7) 
Num2
=
e
3.461
−
Note: DN is the sum of the light gray values of the city and county level cities. 
4.2. “Ghost City” Index 
Ghost City is an urban disease in the process of urban development due to unre-
stricted expansion, lack of rational planning and unbalanced development, and 
the urban housing vacancy rate is too high and the occupancy rate is too low. In 
recent years, residents from the top to the bottom of the country have gradually 
realized the importance of the rational development of the city and began to pay   
182 
Open Journal of Social Sciences 
 
DOI: 10.4236/jss.2019.712013 
 
Q. Q. Zeng, W. J. Zhang 
 
(a) 
(b) 
 
 
Figure 8. Light and population fit curve. (a) Prefecture-level city; (b) County-level city. 
 
attention to the development of “healthy cities”. The existence of the “Ghost City” 
phenomenon  is  inevitably  inconsistent  with  the  trend  of  urban  healthy  devel-
opment. The “Ghost City” index is an important indicator to measure whether 
the city has become a “Ghost City” [4]. Therefore, the monitoring of the “Ghost 
City Index” is particularly important. 
According to the built-up area of prefecture-level cities and county-level cities 
in Sichuan Province extracted from the previous article and the urban popula-
tion obtained according to the fitted regression equation, the “Ghost City” index 
of prefecture-level cities and county-level cities in Sichuan Province is calculated 
(Table 2). The calculation formula is as follows: 
Index
=
Num
S
                                                    (8) 
Note:  Index  is  the  “Ghost  City”  index  of  the  Prefecture-level  city  and  Coun-
ty-level cities; Num is the urban population; S is the built-up area. 
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DOI: 10.4236/jss.2019.712013