Urban settlement of China in the 21st century: national specifics, internal structure dynamics, and spatial forms
Abstract
The geographical analysis of urban settlement in the context of 337 cities of five levels according to the classification of business attractiveness of cities and 19 urban agglomerations was carried out based on official statistical information about Chinese cities YiCai for 2000–2020. Using the literary, mathematical-statistical, comparative-geographical, cartographic methods, geographic systematisation and GIS technologies, the authors calculated internal urban settlement, urban population density, urban influence zone, «rank – size» rule and obtained new results. It has been established that a distinctive feature of Chinese approaches to identifying a city is the inclusion of adjacent territories, including both rural areas and administrative-territorial units of a smaller rank, into its territory along with the core city. An analysis of the geographical location of cities by height above mean sea level and population in the context of five classes of population (small, medium, large, especially large, and extra-large cities) showed that the flat type of urban settlement predominates in nature, and eastern coastal large-settled meridional zone of urban settlement, the eastern continental medium-settled meridional zone of urban settlement, the central small-settled meridional zone of urban settlement, and the western small-settled meridional zone of dispersed urban settlement are distinguished. Analysis of the internal structure of urban settlement determined the trend of macropolisation, the growth of the average population size of cities and the positive dynamics of population growth in two classes of cities, especially large and super-large cities. By using «rank – size» rule calculations for the 5 largest cities in China for 2000 and 2020, it is found that China’s urban settlement is relatively balanced, almost in accordance with Zipf’s law, but largely influenced by government policies. An analysis of 19 urban agglomerations at the national, regional and subregional levels, formed in the country in accordance with the National New Urbanisation Plan (2014–2020), revealed significant differences in the population size and number of cities included in them, which serves as a justification for their in-depth further study to develop differentiated roadmaps for their development.
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