The Study On Eco-Urbanization Based On Complex Ecosystem Theory

Urbanization is one of the world's most conspicuous socio-economic phenomena. As a traditional agricultural country, China is experiencing rapid urbanization process, and it will exert extensive and far-reaching impact on China's society, economy and ecological environment in the coming half-century. Urbanization has served as important research contents in many subjects, such as economics, geography, demography and environmental science, and many excellent research results have been produced. However, those results were often deduced from one subject and not good enough to interpret this complex socio-economic phenomenon well, because of the limitations of subject areas. In complex ecological systems theory, human society was regarded as a special artificial ecosystem driven by people's action, relying on the natural environment, ranked first by the flow of resources, networked by the social system as their meridian. So it can link up the economic, social and ecological problems of urbanization and set up an ideal platform for us to study the problems of urbanization in a larger system and a more integrated perspective. The paper can be divided into two parts:the first part explicates the theories of eco-urbanization, the second part conducts a case study in Hunan Province.In accordance with the theory of complex ecosystems, from a longer historical view, urbanization is a process in which the complex ecosystem achieves fully functioning and optimum structure during human economic and social development, via interaction and mutual restraint among economic subsystem, social subsystem and natural subsystem. The promotion of socio-economic and technological development and the restriction of bottlenecks of resource and environment diversify aggregation effect of production factors in different areas and time, and determine the historical development and regional differentiation of urbanization.As a comprehensive process, urbanization includes four major contents:population urbanization, economy urbanization, society urbanization and space urbanization. In order to facilitate analysis and comparison, this article selects single structural indicator for each of four major contents, and builds a simple and convenient model to calculate the index of comprehensive urbanization, and uses this model to analyze the problems and evolution course of urbanization and the practical urbanization in different areas. The author proposes that the performance of its four major contents and the levels of three major benefits of urbanization vary according to the ways and means of urbanization.The law of value and the development of science and technology can ease the constraints of resources and the environment on the process of urbanization, and people's awareness of resource environment and consumer's attitudes are important parameters of human's impact on the environment. So the relationship between urbanization and resource environment could only be grasped properly within the framework of mutual restraint and interconnection of three major subsystems of complex ecosystem. After analyzing the problems of urbanization and the relationship between resource environment and urbanization, this article defines the eco-urbanization from the level, speed, structure and benefit of urbanization, aiming at maintaining coordination and sustainable development of the complex ecosystem. Then, the author puts forward a new way to promote eco-urbanization by means of synthetic use of price, administration, technology and cultural leverage.In part two, the author carries out a case study in Hunan Province. First, the paper analyzes the problems in the speed, the structure and the benefit of urbanization of Hunan Province according to the four major contents, and specially analyzes the economic, social and ecological benefits of urbanization over the past decade in Hunan, through the vertical and horizontal quantitative comparative analysis. Second, the author probes into the characteristics and the causes of regional differentiation of the urbanization process in Hunan from differences in resources, the environment, location and traffic conditions. Third, the author designs the medium to long-term objectives of eco-urbanization of Hunan Province by analyzing the background and requirements based on the trend forecasts. Fourth, in accordance with the principle of local conditions, the author deciphers eco-urbanization indictors respectively for Eastern and Western Hunan according to the differences in resources environment, economy, location and traffic conditions, and proposes construction plot for the Western Hunan to match the construction of urban agglomerations of Eastern Hunan, and suggests the model of the coordination, matching, radiation, integration and ecological compensation of the two areas. Finally, the author presents the "four-wheel-driving model" and policy recommendations to propel the eco-urbanization of Hunan Province.