Abstract:From the perspectives of the spatial scope definition of urbanization, agricultural development, ecological security, and natural coastline in China, this paper analytically explores the spatial pattern of urbanization, agricultural development, ecological security, and natural coastline, on the basis of crosstab analysis of spatial development suitability, Major Function-Oriented Zoning(MFOZ) and the evaluation of resources and environment carrying capacity. It further concludes the spatial features of the above four patterns through the analysis of quantitative structure, spatial pattern and causes of their resources and environment carrying capacity, spatial development suitability and MFOZ, in conjunction with the comparative study with counterpart structures at national level. The research demonstrates: regions of natural coastline pattern considerably surpass those of urbanization pattern in the indicator-wise, such as percapita GDP, population density, land development intensity, urbanization proportion and alike, which indicates the characteristic of “T shaped” spatial structure is conspicuous in national level. Beyond that, this pattern group tops all the other three in the sense of regional economic and demographic concentration degree, where the aggregation will further continue in the future. As a result, these regions develop as the preferred priority to build megalopolis, and as the leading regions to help promote national competitiveness and to participate in the global competition. Urbanization pattern prefers priority to the regions hold the high level of development suitability, while the agricultural development and ecological security patterns are apparently more targeted at protection issues, where most of the regions bears a low level of development suitability. Specifically speaking, the ecological security pattern reflects the most significant directivity, as almost 95 percent of its total land is less suitable for development, versus half of the regions of agricultural development pattern. Besides, the land of lower development suitability is occupied by urbanized areas to a relatively high degree in the regions of urbanization pattern, raising the cost of land development and construction. As to resources and environment overloading state, all four patterns have seriously crossed the bottom-line, while the highest portion of overloading area was found in the ecological security pattern and the maximum population overloaded proportion in the urbanization pattern. To further study a few more issues, the urbanization and agricultural development patterns commonly face the problem of water resource, and the environmental problem constitutes the core concern of overloading problem in the urbanization and natural coastline patterns. The principle cause of overloading is attributed to a land shortage and environmental degradation in the ecological security pattern.