Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on urban impervious surface spatial patterns and its spatial heterogeneity in cities along the routes

International infrastructure cooperation projects are vital for addressing global challenges, yet previous studies have primarily focused on economic impacts, overlooking their quantitative effects on urban spatial patterns. To fill this gap, we focus on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), one of the largest-scale international projects initiated by the world's largest developing country. Using annual 30-m resolution impervious surface data from 2003 to 2020, we employ a combination of landscape metrics, propensity score matching (PSM), and difference-in-differences (DID) methods to estimate the impacts of the Belt and Road Initiative on the spatial patterns of urban impervious surfaces. Our results indicate that the BRI has a significant and positive influence on urban impervious surface expansion, accompanied by increased fragmentation of urban patches and greater shape complexity. In addition, the association between the BRI and urban land expansion is substantially stronger in cities along the Silk Road Economic Belt, in developing cities, and in weakly governed cities, with the estimated effect in cities along the Silk Road Economic Belt being approximately 3.7 times larger than that in cities along the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. By contrast, in developed and strongly governed cities, the BRI is associated with a statistically significant reduction in urban land expansion, while simultaneously being linked to increased spatial fragmentation. These findings offer empirical evidence to inform context-specific urban land use planning and spatial governance in the context of large-scale cross-border infrastructure initiatives. • We estimated the impact of the BRI on spatial pattern changes of UIS. • BRI is associated with a net increase of 6.794 km 2 in impervious surface area per city along the routes. • The impact of the BRI is greater in cities along the Silk Road Economic Belt, in developing cities, and in cities characterized by weaker governance capacity.