Urban space expansion is an important symbol of the urbanization process and has always been an important topic in urban studies. In addition, for sustainable city management, it is important to identify factors that can influence, such as the driving force and direction of urban space expansion, from the stage of establishing an urban development plan. To understand these factors, by observing the expansion process of a specific city, it is possible to sufficiently observe how the urban spatial dimension changes. Through a series of processes, the spatial growth characteristics of the city are analyzed, and the influence and results of important factors are analyzed. For this purpose, this paper examines the changes in the city's outer boundary and land use structure through monitoring data on urban areas of 14 cities in Hunan Province, China from 2000 to 2016. Temporal and spatial regularity according to the urban space expansion of these cities were analyzed, and a preliminary assessment was made on whether the urban space expansion is coordinated with the urban population growth. The assessment result showed: (1) The urban space of most cities has been extended rapidly in 2000-2015 however, the rate and the intensity of urban space expanding has been declining. (2) The construction of the industrial park is the core driving force of the urban space expanding, and the change of the urban space structure is manifested as enclave city expansion because that the industrial park is usually far away from the city center. (3) The population agglomeration is another driving force of the urban space expanding. At this time, the urban space expanding is like boundary extension. (4) Except Changsha city, all of the cities has a high urbanization-area-growth elastic coefficient. It means that most of the cities should enhance the land use degree.