A Study Of Urbanization Quality:Logical Framework And Chinese Experience

[f we take the Industrial Revolution of Great Britain as the start of world urbanization, then in the following two centuries, the researchers have focused on the speed of urbanization and the quantity of urban expansion, neglecting how to raise the quality of urbanization. China has experienced a period of dramatic urbanization since1949, especially in recent years. At the same time, however, numerous problems such as ecologic damage, environment pollution, traffic jam, greenhouse effect, appearance of urban villages and so on have aroused gradually. It is such issues that force people to consider the real meaning of cities’existence as well as the correct path of urbanization. Based on the above statement, this paper tries to build a unified framework to precisely clarify and accurately measure the quality of urbanization; we also tries to find out the factors affecting urbanization quality and then divide the current stage of urbanization quality according to our criterion. Last, we analyze the chines urbanization quality and urbanization quality among regions theoretically and empirically.Going through the history of urbanization among the world, we find that agglomeration firmly rooted in the labor division, and it is agglomeration that promotes the urbanization. This is a spontaneous evolved process. The fundamental purpose of urbanization is to serve "human", making modern civilization available for all the people. During this process, residents’ income rises as well as the quality and quantity of consumption. Meanwhile, residents benefit a lot from the lower cost of living such as housing and commuting. This process needs to be conducted by the government logically. Thus we define urbanization quality as living quality including urban economic development, public service, living pattern and ecological environment. In the paper, we construct an index system including40indexes to measure the urbanization quality according to the definition and scope of urbanization quality and we use multi-object and multi-layer fussy synthetic optional selection method to weight these indexes. Relying on the data from1999-2010, we measure the urbanization quality of Chinese prefecture-level cities and above.As the empirical result shows, to some extent, urbanization quality of Chinese cities has been improved especially the aspect of ecological environment in recent years. However, the speed of promoting urbanization quality is slow and public service can still not satisfy the need of the residents. Besides income increasing, residents suffer a lot from more steadily increasing of living cost.At present, along with the problem of great economic development gap among regions, urbanization process is unbalanced either. So we investigate urbanization quality among regions further. Based on the assessment of2010urbanization quality of Chinese286prefecture-level cities and above, this paper has discovered that the urbanization quality declines greatly from east to west. Therefore, in the background of Chinese economic transition, with the constant expansion of urbanization quantity, we need to promote the economy growth, increase public service supply to satisfy residents’ need, reduce the cost of living, increase citizen’s income, enrich the quantity and quality of consumption, and keep man and nature develop harmoniously. Thus China’s urbanization can develop well both in quantity and quality, then realize the fast and prosperous development of Chinese economy.