With the continuous expansion of city size, urban man-made landforms also experience constant formation, expansion and evolution. City, as the region where human activities are most concentrated, is most strongly influenced by human activities. Meanwhile, it is also the largest distribution area of man-made landscapes on the Earth surface. The research on the formation and evolution of urban man-made landforms must be combined with the evolution of urban spatial structure to explore the development pattern and law of man-made landforms in urban areas. Corresponding to urban spatial evolution, the formation and evolution of urban man-made landforms is of an ordered process (
Huang and Zhu, 1996), which can be divided into three stages: dilation, renewal and diffusion, and differential renewal and diffusion (
Mu and Gao, 1990). In the early formation of a city, man-made landforms such as buildings are arranged in dot distribution in places with convenient transportation and rich resources, then extended outward continuously and developed into landforms of planar distribution. When the city expands to a certain size, influenced by terrain and transportation, urban man-made landforms experience obvious internal renewal like old city reconstruction. Meanwhile, the density and single size of urban man-made landforms keep increasing. After that, blocks with favorable conditions in each region are gradually formed and united together. The spatial distribution range of urban man-made landforms also extends continuously (
Cooke et al., 1982). On this basis, by combining the development history of Dalian and the characteristics of its development orientation, Li
et al. (2003) divided the evolution of urban man-made landforms in the city area into four periods. They are single-core diffusion period, U-shaped extension period, annular zonary renewal and diffusion period, and multicore radiation-zonary development period. The rapid expansion of the urban space in Dalian directly led to the expansion of urban man-made landforms. From the perspective of horizontal morphological expansion, growth patterns of urban man-made landforms from CDB (central business district) to surrounding areas include concentric sprawl, local fan-shaped expansion, gallery-type radiation, enclave-style growth and agglutinating fill (
Liu, 2004). At the same time, urban man-made landforms also show a typical characteristic of vertical growth (
Li, 2004). This shows the vertical expansion of man-made landforms in CBD area that presents different time sequence and growth patterns. In addition, the vertical growth of urban man-made landforms has significant periodical characteristics (
Chang, 2004). Certainly, the horizontal expansion and vertical growth of urban man-made landforms may exist simultaneously and finally constitute overall urban man-made geomorphological landscape patterns.