Spatial Structure Evolution of Urban Agglomerations and Its Driving Factors in Mainland China: From the Monocentric to the Polycentric Dimension

Feng Lan,Ying Wang,Huili Da,Haizhen Wen

doi:10.3390/su11030610

Feng Lan, Ying Wang + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su11030610

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Abstract

Urban agglomerations (UAs) have become the urbanized “growth poles”, especially against the background of increasing population flow to cities. The spatial structure of UAs has been deemed the essential factor affecting regional function and sustainable development. Although there have been many meaningful studies on spatial structure changes in China, a systematically comparative work of UAs is still absent. Under this context, this paper examines the changing process of spatial structure in 20 Chinese UAs from monocentric to polycentric during the years 1992–2012 by using the night-time light data—an alternative to census data—and explores the major driving forces underlying the evolution. Our empirical results suggest that there is an obvious polycentric tendency of UAs, the spatial distribution pattern of which is not apparent. Panel regression models reveal that the economic level, the population size, the foreign direct investment (FDI), the human capital, and the transport infrastructure play significant positive roles in shaping the polycentric changing process, while the growth of the government expenditure does the opposite. Moreover, transport infrastructure and FDI are positively associated with polycentric spatial structure in mature UAs; on the contrary, they are negatively associated with it in the emerging UAs. Our study results have important policy implications for rapid Chinese urbanization—the policy whereby “China’s future urbanization development model is to limit the agglomeration of large cities while focusing on developing small and medium-sized cities” may be more efficient in mature UAs.

Highlights

With the rapid reform of the social and economic paradigm and the progress of urbanization, there have been more collective and cooperative developments among cities since the post-industrial era
A slight difference from the overall trend is that the Central Plains (CPL) urban agglomerations (UAs), the Central and Southern Liaoning (CSLN) UA and the West Taiwan straits (WTS) UA had monocentric trends in 2002–2007 (Figure 3c,d)
It was found that the polycentric development of the spatial structure at the city-region level in China has been rather unbalanced

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid reform of the social and economic paradigm and the progress of urbanization, there have been more collective and cooperative developments among cities since the post-industrial era. The urban spatial form has transformed from individual cities into mega-city regions or metropolises. These emerging new urban forms are called urban agglomerations (UAs) in China, characterized by a cluster of cities consisting of big cities, middle cities, and small cities [1,2]. China’s urbanization level has been 58.5% in 2017 and it is expected to reach 75% by 2050, which means that more population will flow into the city in the future. In this context, UAs have become the main body for the implementation of further urbanization and regional development [3,4,5]. Over the past 30 years, many large UAs, such as the Yangtze River Delta UA and the Pearl

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