Abstract
China’s rapid urbanization has aroused substantial attention all over the world. Though there exists a strong connection between urban system and intercity migration, an overall prediction of China’s urban population of all cities based on migration network has rarely been conducted. This study proposes an extended NEG (New Economic Geography) model to simulate China’s urban system evolution with actual data and further predicts the future development of China’s urban system under three different urbanization scenarios. We discover that China’s future development trend is centralized urbanization dominated by large cities with a population of above 1 million. This prediction result is of great significance to provide scientific evidence for China’s population flow management and new-type urbanization planning.
Highlights
Since the 1990s, accompanying the rapid urbanization, an important feature of China’s social change is its large-scale interregional migration, originating from the high demand for labor in the eastern coastal region due to its development policy and the gradual loosening of migration and household registration policies
As intercity migration is one kind of city network and an important aspect of the research on urban system, it is feasible and necessary to combine the studies of migration and urban system to establish a comprehensive research framework and Krugman’s [56] racetrack economy model provides a particular way to realize this goal, because city size distribution is determined by migration in this model
The size proportions of cities at all levels under the “large-city-dominated” scenario are similar to those of the baseline scenario, except that the size proportion of megalopolises under the “large-citydominated” scenario is slightly lower, while the size proportion of large cities is a little higher. This demonstrates that the prediction result under the “large-city-dominated” scenario is closest to the natural law of urban system evolution, in which the agglomeration economic effect plays a decisive role, while the other two scenarios are mainly affected by policies
Summary
Since the 1990s, accompanying the rapid urbanization, an important feature of China’s social change is its large-scale interregional migration, originating from the high demand for labor in the eastern coastal region due to its development policy and the gradual loosening of migration and household registration policies. The key research question in this paper, concerns how China’s migration network influences the urban system and what the distribution of China’s future city sizes will be. This is of particular interest for several reasons. The model is used as the basis for predicting the size changes of all cities, regarding the whole urban system as a network connected by intercity migration, with the prediction results providing scientific evidence for decision making in National New-Type Urbanization Planning, in terms of floating population management, public service improvement and urban system planning.
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