Abstract
The development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) is an important national regional development strategy and a strategic engineering development system. In this study, the evolution of urban spatial patterns in the YREB from 1990 to 2010 was mapped using the nighttime stable light (NSL) data, multi-temporal urban land products, and multiple sources of geographic data by using the rank-size distribution and the Gini coefficient method. Through statistical results, we found that urban land takes on the feature of “high in the east and low in the west”. The study area included cities of different development stages and sizes. The nighttime light increased in most cities from 1992 to 2010, and the rate assumed an obvious growth tendency in the three urban agglomerations in the YREB. The results revealed that the urban size distribution of the YREB is relatively dispersed, the speed of urban development is unequal, and the trend of urban size structure shows a decentralized distribution pattern that has continuously strengthened from 1990 to 2010. Affected by factors such as geographical conditions, spatial distance, and development stage, the lower reaches of the Yangtze River have developed rapidly, the upper and middle reaches have developed large cities, and a contiguous development trend is not obvious. The evolution of urban agglomerations in the region presents a variety of spatial development characteristics. Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai have entered a phase of urban continuation, forming a more mature interregional urban agglomeration, while the YREB inland urban agglomerations are in suburbanization and multi-centered urban areas. At this stage, the conditions for the formation of transregional urban agglomerations do not yet exist, and there are many uncertainties in the boundary and spatial structure of each urban agglomeration.
Highlights
The Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) is a typical basin economy
In the early 1980s, academic Lu Dadao, a prominent economic geographer in China, proposed the “T”-shaped development strategy, that the coastal economic belt and the Yangtze river economic belt meet in the Yangtze River Delta, and the YREB connects the Chengdu–Chongqing region, Wuhan region, and coastal economic belt
From the spatial distribution data of urban land data in the YREB from 1990 to 2010 (Figure 4a), the spatial distribution of urban space generally presented a trend of dense cities in the east, and less urban land in the central and western cities
Summary
The Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) is a typical basin economy. From a worldwide perspective, the study of economic problems in the basin began in the 1940s. In the early 1980s, academic Lu Dadao, a prominent economic geographer in China, proposed the “T”-shaped development strategy, that the coastal economic belt and the Yangtze river economic belt meet in the Yangtze River Delta, and the YREB connects the Chengdu–Chongqing region, Wuhan region, and coastal economic belt. This spatial structure accurately reflects the distribution framework of China’s land and resources, economic strength, and development potential. “The Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt on the Basis of the Golden Waterway” issued by the State Council clearly stated that it is necessary to build the Yangtze River Economic Belt into an inland river economic belt with global influence [11,12,13,14]
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