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Although the designation of greenbelts around cities has been a common practice for several decades, some greenbelts have not been successfully protected from development. To explore the forces driving the construction of greenbelts, this paper examines how past land use and land cover decisions and current socioeconomic factors have affected the development of the artificial greenbelt zone in China’s Shanghai metropolitan area. Using aerial photographs from 1994, 2005, and 2010, we find that the area of afforested greenbelt was generally related to past land use/cover decisions. Compared with cropland and grassland, factory, village, and urban land use/cover types showed higher resistance to transitioning to forest during the study period. Moreover, the Mantel test showed little spatial autocorrelation between protected land and geodetic coordinates. Principal coordinates of neighbour matrices analysis showed that socioeconomic and urban contextual variables explained 9 % of the variation in protected land, whereas the spatial variables explained 24 %. Population migration towards the city’s suburban fringes negatively affected the greenbelt area, while district-level finance revenue was a positive factor and town/sub-district-level gross domestic product was a negative factor, depending on the investment sources for greenbelt construction. Furthermore, distance to the sub-centre and distance to a subway station had positive influences. Understanding these driving forces can help improve greenbelt planning and management.
