Urbanization is an inevitable trend of modernization. After reform and opening up, China has completed the 200-year urbanization process of Western countries in 40 years, creating a historical miracle of urbanization in the world. However, Rapid urbanization has also exposed many deep-seated contradictions, such as the semi-urbanization caused by the obstruction of the citizenship of migrant workers; the extensive land use caused by urban sprawl; the polarization of urban development caused by the bias of resource allocation, the polarization effect of the market, etc. The imbalance in the structure and layout of urban resource factors (human, land, finance, infrastructure, etc.) further limits the sustainable development of urbanization and exacerbates China’s uneven and inadequate development. Therefore, We construct an evaluation index system of population, land, economic and social urbanization, and measure the coupling coordination degree of those four urbanization subsystems (CCDU) by Coupling Coordination Model from the perspective of structural equilibrium, and portray spatio-temporal evolutionary characteristics of CCDU of 110 cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YERB) from 2000 to 2018 by Spatial Markov Chain from the perspective of balanced layout, and further explain its driving forces. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) The CCDU in YERB shows an increasing trend, the further upstream the basin, the weaker the CCDU development, and the imbalance between land and economic urbanization is the main constraint for improvement of CCDU in YERB. (2) There is an evident concentration of cities with high-level and low-level CCDU, indicating a significant influence of path dependence. (3) Inefficient infrastructure utilization and unreasonable supply structure are the main constraints to the improvement of CCDU in YERB, and the market barriers between regions are the key factors affecting the synergistic development of urbanization.
Nian Tong; Shougeng Hu
China University of Geosciences
ID Abstract: 740