Abstract
Research on urban agglomerations from the perspective of network spatial structure is important to promote their sustainable development. Based on online and traditional data, this paper first improves three aspects of the traditional spatial gravity model—city quality, the gravitation coefficient, and city distance—considering urban center functional intensity and population mobility tendencies. The resulting improved directional gravity model is applied to analyze the structure of the city network for two urban agglomerations in China, the Beijing‐Tianjin‐Hebei urban agglomeration (BTHUA) and the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration (YRDUA). The results of the study are as follows: (1) the existing urban connections have obvious hierarchies and imbalances, with the YRDUA urban hierarchical connections being of larger scale. (2) Cities are closely connected, but city networks are unbalanced, though the YRDUA has more balanced urban development. (3) Each node city has a clear radiation range limit, and spatial distance remains an important constraint on urban connections. The backbone network of the BTHUA has a triangular shape and trends toward a “sparse north and dense south,” while the YRDUA is characterized by multiple axes and an overall distribution that trends toward a “dense north and sparse south.” (4) Cities with poor comprehensive strength are more likely to be captured, forming an attract and be attracted relationship. (5) The BTHUA and the YRDUA each form three communities.
Highlights
As a relatively complete aggregate and a basic regional unit that participates in global competition and the international division of labor, the development of urban agglomerations affects a country’s international competitiveness and has great significance for the sustained and stable development of a country and its regional economies [1]
(3) Each node city has a clear radiation range limit, and spatial distance remains an important constraint on urban connections. e backbone network of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration (BTHUA) has a triangular shape and trends toward a “sparse north and dense south,” while the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration (YRDUA) is characterized by multiple axes and an overall distribution that trends toward a “dense north and sparse south.” (4) Cities with poor comprehensive strength are more likely to be captured, forming an attract and be attracted relationship. (5) e BTHUA and the YRDUA each form three communities
Hierarchical Structure of Cities. e uneven distribution of intercity connections has led to the emergence of urban hierarchical structures. e city level is the basic factor used to distinguish the types of city network structures. e city levels in the urban agglomerations are divided and their scales compared as the basic premise for understanding the city network structure of the urban agglomerations. is paper uses the Jenks method to classify the BTHUA and the YRDUA
Summary
As a relatively complete aggregate and a basic regional unit that participates in global competition and the international division of labor, the development of urban agglomerations affects a country’s international competitiveness and has great significance for the sustained and stable development of a country and its regional economies [1]. With the continuous acceleration of industrialization and urbanization and the coordinated development of regional economies, urban agglomerations have gradually become the main spatial form promoting China’s new urbanization. With the acceleration of the globalization process and the increasingly close connections between cities, space for Complexity flows has gradually replaced space for places as the basic theory of urban agglomeration space research [4]. As an important manifestation of the spatial structure of urban agglomerations, network structure reflects the combination of points and lines between cities and towns and expands the static structure of central place theory, such as the hierarchy, order, and scale of the space of flows. City network spatial structure research mainly used traffic flow and enterprise organization flow to describe city networks
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