Impact of geological background on city development

•Development of landform is controlled by geological structures on Earth’s surface.•City distribution is restricted by landform but fundamentally by large-scale faults.•Geoinformation technology was harnessed to uncover such quantitative relationship.•City development is closely related with elevation, slope, river and especially faults. As geographic environment is an expression of the geological settings, it is the objective of this research to explore the roles of geological background in society development, in particular, city development. Based on field trips, geological and tectonic maps, digital elevation model (DEM) and Google Earth images were utilized for this study. Simple linear and binary logistic regression (BLR) and a set of spatial analysis were applied to explore the impacts of environmental factors on city distribution and its relationship with the geological factors taking Jiangxi, China as an example. Here we show that distribution of all level of cities is surprisingly consistent with the lithospheric faults, deep-and-large faults which constitute the fundamental framework for developing the open valleys, rivers and plains that host in turn cities. This finding may provide scientists with deeper understanding and rethinking on the human-environmental interaction and decision-makers an idea where to urbanize in future.