Urban Agglomerations In The Regional Integration Perspective Formation Mechanism

The 11th 5-Year Plan of china regards Urban Agglomeration as the main pattern of Urbanization, More and more local governments plan to construct Urban Agglomeration. But in practice, they pay attention to expanding the range of city or adding the number of city. The cognition pitfalls misguide the policy making, and yield great lost of efficiencies. In fact, we need to explore the basic law of form and development process of Urban Agglomeration under the transform and development stage, and re-understand the role of government and market in the form and development process.The paper interprets the form and development law of Urban Agglomeration under the transform and development stage from the view of the regional integration. First, On the basis of literature review, the paper redefines the immanence essence and characteristics of Urban Agglomeration, and put forward the hypothesis that the formation of Urban Agglomeration is not only the process of agglomeration and dispersal based on the region choice by firm and household, but also the process of industry evolution by vertical linkage, Besides, Institutional Change by local government plays an important role in the process. The formation of Urban Agglomeration is not only Self-organization process, but also Hetero-Organization process. Second, the paper analyzes the process from three different aspects of firm relocation, industry evolution and Institutional Change, based on the core-model and local government competition and space self-organization model. At last, the case of Yangtze River delta is presented to verify the hypothesis.The main conclusions of the paper are: first, the immanence essence of Urban Agglomeration is the reflection of regional integration in space shape. It not only has the perfect city network system, but also functionally integral collaborative network and perfect coordination mechanism and Regional governance structure. Second, its formation is not only the process of agglomeration and dispersal based on the region choice by firm and household, but also the process of industry evolution by vertical linkage; Besides, Institutional Change by local government plays an important role in the process. Second, the firm relocation mechanism of urban agglomeration formation is that as the evolution of production organization and network of business sector as well as business re-location options, corporate headquarters and production department separation in space resulted in the agglomeration and dispersal, which further promote the formation of production networks of urban agglomeration. And so the function of urban has been transferred and forms the pattern of functional division of urban, which means corporate headquarters concentrated in core cities gradually, and enterprises manufacturing sector increasingly concentrated in the periphery city. The industry evolution mechanism of urban agglomeration formation is that the proliferation of the agglomeration and dispersal on the basis of firm relocation further promote the distribution of changes, thus changing the city's degree of specialization and diversification. the distribute changes in different industry location bring about functions of the division of labor of urban agglomeration , producer services concentrated in the central city, while the manufacturing industry concentrated in the periphery cities, which leads to the functional integration of urban agglomeration . The space structure of Functional division of urban agglomeration is reflected as the core - periphery structure. FDI not only promote the evolution of urban agglomeration industry location and structure, but also connect the production networks of urban agglomeration and the global production networks of production networks, and further promote the transformation from core-periphery structure to layer structure of urban agglomeration. The Institutional Change mechanism of urban agglomeration formation is that Institutional Change by local government competition provides a favorable environment, not only to promote the market integration of urban agglomeration, as well as the interest coordination of urban agglomeration, but also to promote the urban agglomeration of city infrastructure, coordinated urban and rural development and sustainable development.To sum up, the paper's innovation include two sides. First, based on the analysis framework of the regional actors, the paper studies the formation mechanism of urban agglomeration simultaneously in the phase of reform and development from the perspective of regional integration. It explains the self-organization and Hetero-Organization process from three different aspects of firm relocation, industry evolution and Institutional Change. the other is that it measure the degree of regional integration based on functional Division of labor, which can correct these measurement deviations of regional integration occurred in previous studies by the industrial division of labor between cities, and change the cognition pitfalls of industry structure. the paper systematically interpret the transformation process of Urban Agglomeration from the industrial division of labor to the functional division of labor, and propose to promote the formation of urban agglomeration and integration from the perspective of functional division of labor.