The driving forces of urbanization research in previous studies are socio-economic, environmental and technological development. We argue that government policies play an important role in shaping urbanization, especially in Socialist countries. In the past two decades, many super cities have emerged in China, and their size and spatial patterns are constantly changing. This paper aims to develop a deductive method to reveal the development patterns of Beijing under the influence of governmental policies and predict the future development of the city. Specifically, we first propose the concept of road network-based urban texture to describe the level of urbanization. Second, we use linear functions and neural networks to learn the spatio-temporal development patterns from Beijing’s survey and mapping data from 2005 to 2015. Finally, we validate the proposed method using the survey and mapping data of 2022. The experimental results confirm that our hypothesis in findings reasonable and the proposed method is able to predict the future development of cities.