Land use and cover changes are remarkably characterized by the temporal evolution and spatial differences. Comprehensive studies of these characteristics are very important for understanding the structure of land use and the trend of urbanization. With the support of the remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS) techniques, the authors incised a width of 5km along the Huangpu River coast as the study area from the Landsat TM/ETM+ images of Shanghai in 1992 and 2008. Moreover, for a comparative analysis, the study area was segmented into four subareas with the inner and exterior ring roads of Shanghai City. The two images were classified by using the minimum distance classifier in Envi 4.2 to map the land use. Several indexes, such as land use dynamic degree, intensity and relative change rate, were calculated to describe the land use changes. With the spatial analysis functions for the graphic in a GIS environment, newly increased builtup area were mapped to qualitatively analyze the spatiotemporal evolution of land use in Huangpu River coast. This study has demonstrated that the builtup area was greatly increased, the gardened area was slightly raised, and the cultivated land was drastically decreased in Huangpu River coast form 1992 to 2008. At the same time, the land use dynamic degree and the intensity of the eastern area were larger than the indexes of the average values of the whole Huangpu River coast.