Abstract: Abstract: Urban expansion can be seen as a spatial non-stationary process because of the natural environment, social and economic characteristics are distinctive in different regions. The complexity of land use in urban fringe determines its unique urbanization process and mechanism, to explore the driving factors of land use change in urban fringe is not only helpful to the alleviation of land use conflicts and the optimization of urban space structure but also has a realistic significance in the protection of cultivated land resource and ecological environment. Based on remote sensing images in 1999 and 2010 and GIS data, we spatially integrated proximity variables, neighborhood variables and policy variables with global logistic regression model and local geographically weighted logistic regression (GWLR) model to explore driving factors of urban expansion in the urban fringe area with Jiangning District of Nanjing as an example. Results showed that: 1) logistic model and GWLR model respectively explained 51%, 64% of urban land change of the study area over historical periods, and the latter model had advantages in local estimation with better parameters which could be better applied to simulation, prediction and mechanism investigation of urban expansion in the study area. Moreover, land use data sampling integrated system sampling and random sampling, which could effectively reduce the influence of spatial autocorrelation on the research results. 2) Considering the two model results, X3, X5, X1 which belong to proximity variables; X6 which belongs to neighborhood variables and X11 which belongs to policy variables were the key explanatory variables for urban expansion in the studied area. It indicated the agglomeration effects of industrial park and urban center in urban fringe area, as well as promotion role of the land market and internal transportation network, were important driving factors to the urban land change of urban fringe. 3) Using GIS tools, GWLR model could visualize the spatial non-stationary characteristics of driving factors, in order to explore a more intuitive and profound drive mode of urban expansion in the study area. Different explanatory varieties presented individual spatial pattern, according to which we discovered the main driving factors and limited factors of urban expansion in different districts of the study area. This could provide a new perspective for farmland and ecology protection. Overall, the government's leading power represented by land transferring behavior and development zone construction were the core motivation for urban expansion in the studies area, which reflected the common characteristics of urban suburbanization of China to some extent and provided some advices for the land management in the similar urban fringe.