Abstract: Under the strategic guidance of “grasping the major protection and no large-scale development”, it is of great significance to accurately identify the urban built-up areas of the Yangtze River Economic Belt and reveal its evolution laws for optimizing the spatial pattern of the river basin. Based on Landsat data and night lighting data, this paper constructs a fusion algorithm to extract urban built-up areas of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and uses fractal theory, core density, spatial autocorrelation and other technical methods to reveal the evolution pattern and spatial correlation of the urban built-up areas. Results show that: (1) The overall pattern identification shows that urban scale of the Yangtze River Economic Belt shows an obvious rank-size distribution pattern, which has significant fractal features. (2) The scale of urban built-up areas in the Yangtze River Economic Belt shows regional differences, precisely, they take Yangtze River as the axis, some are high in the east while the others are low in the west. Besides, some in the central axis are higher than those in the both sides. The density of built-up areas is spatially distributed as one central spot with two sub-central spots. (3) We find that the urban scale of the Yangtze River Economic Belt expanded gradually, and the expanding formation transformed from the pole to the axis, and overall shows a “T” growth pattern. (4) By the comparison of different regions, we find that the fast-growing areas are mainly distributed in Yangtze River Delta city group, Chengdu-Chongqing city group and Wuhan city group. Our results can provide reference and decision-making proof for the tradeoff between “protection” and “development” of the river basin.