Spatial-temporal patterns of urbanization and rural development and their coordination in Bohai Rim region

Abstract

Urbanization is an inevitable trend with the development of industrialization. Exploring the response of rural development to urbanization process is of great importance to understand the urban-rural relationship, regional urbanization and rural development. Taking Bohai Rim region which includes 325 counties as the study object and using an integrated utilization of GIS, entropy method and coordination index model, this study investigated the spatial patterns of urbanization and rural development, and analyzed their coordination characteristics including statistical and spatial relations. The results show that:(1) The levels of urbanization in Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan, Shandong Peninsula and central-south Liaoning are much higher than those of west Liaoning and north Hebei, while the levels of rural development in Beijing,Tianjin and Shandong are much higher than in Hebei and Liaoning, with high-level rural development areas concentrated in Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan region and Shandong peninsula. Meanwhile, the disparity of rural development level between different regions is much lower than that of urbanization level.(2) The development of urbanization boosts the sustainable economic and social development in the rural areas to some extent, however, with the speedup of urbanization, the coordination level presents a declining trend, and the differences in rural development are generally enlarged.(3) It is necessary to analyze the coordination index based on the status of regional urbanization and rural development. Some developed areas have low level of coordination index and some undeveloped areas have higher levels.(4) To integrate urban and rural development and advance urbanization and the building of new rural areas in a coordinated manner, we should take effective measures to adapt the urban-rural dual system to the requirement of flow and linkage of urban-rural factors, promote balanced development among regions according to the policies that involve the main grain producing areas and ecological reserves, and promote urbanization based on local characteristics such as location, development stage and resources endowment.