Megacity Growth, City System and Urban Strategy

Abstract

This paper analyzes the development pattern of 35 megacities from 1980 to 2020 and examines the impact of megacity’s growth on the city system. We use primacy, urban concentration, Zipf’s coefficient, and entropy to characterize the city system in a country with a megacity. Our analysis finds the following: (1) The growth rates of megacities are faster than the totals of the national population and national urban population in general; (2) the growth of megacities makes the city system diverge; (3) the development of megacities tends to be companied by the shrinking of small cities; and (4) emerging megacities has substantial impacts on urbanization strategy, urban planning, and policy.