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Recently, local floods have become severely threatening to urban safety in China. As the capital city, Beijing has experienced serious local floods every year. In this paper spatial characteristics of local floods in the Beijing urban area were studied. Local flood locations changed and appeared as a spatial expansion trend from 1981 to 2011. Since all of the local floods were located in built-up areas, we further studied the relation between local floods and built-up areas using the spatial statistics of Geographic Information Systems. The results show that they had the same directional development trend which indicated local floods would get worse with the expansion of built-up areas. It also found that most local floods were located where there were high densities of drainage pipes, so we could infer that pipe systems should not be the only way to solve local floods due to their failures and negative effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]