Mining the Urban Sprawl Pattern: A Case Study on Sunan, China

China's urbanization is going into a fast development stage. This paper focuses on the recent evolution of an urbanized area – Sunan, the southern part of Jiangsu province in the Yangtze River Delta in China – by means of complementary approaches, especially different fractal and autocorrelation measures. The research shows that Sunan's urban clusters are becoming more and more homogenous and compact and are growing up along the important transportation axes. The enriching discussion of the findings establishes the links between the morphology of urban sprawl and recent socio-economic changes in China.