Assessing the effects of the new-type urbanization policy on rural settlement evolution using a multi-agent model

Abstract

Urbanization is an inevitable trend of modernization. In recent years, the Chinese government has proposed a new urbanization policy to accelerate the citizenization of the migrant agricultural population. The proposal of China's new urbanization strategy will inevitably cause the large-scale migration of China's urban and rural population, thus impacting the evolution patterns of China's rural settlements. To investigate the future evolution trends of rural settlement patterns against the background of new-type urbanization, we constructed a rural settlement multi-agent system (RSMAS) that can explicitly simulate the influences of government policies. In the model, we set four types of agents, including urban area, rural area, government, and peasant household. Through top-down control and bottom-up response, the model can reveal the mutual gaming relationships, influencing relationships, and feedback relationships among agents against the background of new-type urbanization. Taking Jizhou District of Tianjin, which is one of the first pilot areas of new-type urbanization, as an example, we first simulated the changes of rural settlement patterns in Jizhou District from 2005 to 2015 using the RSMAS. The accuracy of the model simulation was 60.96%, indicating that the model has good reliability. Second, we predicted the impact of the new-type urbanization policy on the rural settlement patterns in Jizhou District in 2030, using 2015 as the starting year. The household registration system is no longer the key constraint to urbanization. The trend of the expansion of rural settlements has been effectively curbed after the implementation of new urbanization. In addition, government-led urbanization processes would increase the local financial burden. Therefore, we suggest that the government should effectively control these processes, activate the rural financial market, and promote the participation of local state-owned enterprises in financing.