Abstract
The structure of urban hierarchy and the role of cities of different sizes have drawn considerable scholarly interests and societal concerns. This paper analyzes the evolution and underlying mechanisms of urban hierarchy in China during the recent period of rapid urbanization. By comparing scale changes of seven types of cities (megacity, large city, Type I big city, Type II big city, medium-sized city, type I small city and type II small city), we find that allometry is the main characteristic of urban hierarchical evolution in China. We also test the validity of Zipf’s law and Gibrat’s law, which broaden the scope of existing studies by including county-level cities. We find that urban hierarchical distribution is lognormal, rather than Pareto. The result also shows that city size growth rates are constant across cities of different types. For better understanding of the mechanisms of urban hierarchical formation, we measure the optimal city size and resource allocation by the Pareto optimality criterion and non-parametric frontier method. The main findings are as follows: (1) scale efficiency is still at a relatively low level among the seven types of cities; (2) the economic efficiency of megacities and large cities is overestimated when compared to economic-environmental efficiency. Hence, this paper has two policy implications: (1) to correct factor market (land, labor and infrastructure investment) distortions among different types of cities for the improvement of efficiency; (2) to strengthen rural property rights to improve social equity, as well as land use intensity.
Highlights
The spatial and temporal evolution of urban hierarchy has drawn considerable scholarly interests [1,2,3] and societal concerns [4,5,6]
Focusing on the rapid urbanization period of China, we compared the demographic change of seven types of cities from 2000 to 2010 and tested the validity of Zipf’s law and Gibrat’s law
To investigate the underlying mechanisms of urban hierarchy formation in China, we investigated the optimal city size and efficient resource allocation by the Pareto optimality criterion and non-parametric frontier methods
Summary
The spatial and temporal evolution of urban hierarchy has drawn considerable scholarly interests [1,2,3] and societal concerns [4,5,6]. In China, labor and capital have been largely migrating to coastal metropolitan areas since the 1990s [7,8,9], which has been contributing to serious urban problems, such as traffic congestion, environment pollution and resource limitation, alongside threatening social stability and sustainable development [10,11]. To cope with these challenges and as part of the objectives to encourage rapid and healthy urbanization, the Chinese government has promoted policies to optimize the distribution of urban population. Based on theoretical and empirical analyses, this paper attempts to answer the following questions in the context of China: (1) How does the structure of different types of cities in China change? (2) How is the real distribution of urban hierarchy different from optimal distribution? (3) What is the driving force for megacities to attract such large migration?
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