Abstract: With the continuous acceleration of the urbanization process, the contradiction between man and land has become increasingly prominent, and the compact urban development mode has become one of the main ways to curb the disorderly spread of the city and alleviate the “big city disease”. According to its core connotation and related theories, this paper takes 13 cities in Changsha, Hunan, Zhuzhou and Xiangtan as the object of study. The compactness evaluation index system is established from three dimensions： high density, reasonable structure and good efficiency. Stepwise regression analysis, the urban compactness and its main influencing factors were analyzed and analyzed to explore the spatial and temporal characteristics of urban compactness in Hunan province. The results show that： the overall level of urban compactness in Hunan province is increasing, the high and medium degree compact cities are increasing, the low degree of compact cities are decreasing, and the gap between cities is gradually widening. The distribution of the high, medium and low degree of compact cities in Hunan province has changed from “water droplets” to inverted “water droplets”, and presents the spatial pattern of rising from west to east. The main factors influencing the urban compactness of Hunan province are economic density, followed by land mixture, population growth elasticity, population density and so on.

Key words: urban compactness, characteristics of the synergetic evolution, influence factors, Hunan province