Pattern, Dvnamics And Mechanism Of Spatial Evolution In Yangtze River Delta

Globalization and Informatization have profound influence on both the enterprise’s spatial organization and the urban and regional economy all over the world. From the key words with high frequency in the academic reference, such as "global city","world city","global city-region","polycentric mega city region" and so on, we can see that spatial organization of city/city-regions and its evolution have become hot topics since the last90s. Nevertheless, most theoretical researches and quantitative studies are based on the economic circumstance and development experience of regions in western developed countries. We are still lacking the literature concentrating the spatial patterns and evolutional characteristics of city-regions in socialist developing countries.Since the economic reforms of China in1978, Globalization, Informatization, Marketization, Decentralization, and urbanization have become five main driving forces of economic development in China, which also triggered the dramatic spatial transformation of cities or city-regions. However, giving the particular background of decentralization and the rapid urbanization, which is quite different from the circumstance in western countries, we need to examine the spatial pattern and evolutional process of city-regions in China and explore the mechanisms for the spatial evolution of the city-region. In addition, studying on the spatial pattern, dynamics and mechanisms of city-regions’ evolution in China are also in great need for the national strategies’ drafting and implement. As we know, Urban Agglomerations strategy has been considered as an important national strategy to improve the development of regionalization and regional coordination since the "eleventh national economic and social five-year planning" in2005, and a lot of urban agglomerations’ plannings have been approved, such as Regional Planning of Yangtze River Delta. Therefore, it is a urgent assignment for urban geographers to study the dynamics process of concentration and diffusion of a relative developed urban agglomeration and its mechanisms seems urgent.Based on the research background and objectives, Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration was chosen as our case study area, which has experienced dramatic economic and spatial transformation since the economic reforms in1978. There are three core research questions be answered in this dissertation. First, what’s the spatial pattern of Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration’ evolution? Does the trend of equalization and networking exist? Second, what’s the dynamics process of concentration and diffusion in different scale? Is there any spatial spillover with the development of metropolitans? Third, what are the driving forces for the spatial evolution of Urban Agglomeration in China? And what’s role the government acts as?The dissertation consists of four parts, including8chapters in total. The first part is composed of three chapters, which aims at constructing the analytic framework by reviewing the urban agglomeration relative theories. The second part includes the next2chapters, which examines the spatial pattern and its dynamic process of Yangtze River Delta’s evolution. The third part includes Chapter6and7, which analyses the driving forces of urban agglomeration’s spatial evolution and explores the roles of enterprise and government. Then the last part is about the conclusion and prospect.Chapter1is the introduction. Mainly introduces the research background, objectives, theory and practice meaning, and the analytic framework of the dissertation. In addition, the methodology and dataset are introduced as well.Chapter2and Chapter3are literature review and theory discussion. Chapter2reviews the concept evolutions of "urban agglomeration" and "spatial evolution" and its traditional theory, and then refines the study dimension and content of urban agglomeration in this dissertation. Chapter3mainly focuses on the new progress of city-regions studies in recent years. The growing literature on changing urban systems coincides with the increasing popularity of the urban network concept in contemporary background provide us new perspectives and new methods to analyze the spatial evolution of city-regions. Based on traditional theories and new progresses, we propose our theoretical hypothesizes and refine the analytic framework.Chapter4and Chapter5are quantitative researches about the spatial pattern and dynamics process of Yangtze River Delta’s evolution. From the multi-scale perspective, chapter4analyzed the evolutional characteristics of spatial structure, spatial relations and the regional inequality in Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration. The result shows that networking, equaling, and polycentric are obvious feathers during the Yangtze River Delta’s spatial evolution. In chapter5, we explore the spatial agglomeration and diffusion in different spatial scale, and examine the spatial spillover of the metropolitans. According to the results, we identify the spillover of metropolitans and the contents of agglomeration and diffusion.Chapter6and Chapter7are researches about mechanisms of Urban Agglomeration’s spatial evolution. In chapter6, we first take the urban agglomeration as a spatial system and discuss the system theory, based on which we construct an analytic framework from three main actor’s contribution, enterprise, labor, and government. Then, we investigate the impact of enterprise’s actions on the spatial evolution of Yangtze River delta, including both the spatial structure and the spatial relation. Chapter7is the research about the government’s role in urban agglomeration’s spatial evolution. First, we analyze the government’s actions from macroscopic and microscopic perspective. Second, we explore the effect of actions taken by "Central Government" and "Local Government" using the method of quantitative analysis. Then we examine the effect of government’s planning and preferential policies on the spatial evolution of Yangtze River delta by analyzing the specialization and cooperation among the development zones in urban agglomeration. According to the results, we identify that the government plays a significant role directly in the spatial evolution of urban agglomeration, and also plays an indirect role though the effects on enterprise’s actions.Chapter8is the conclusion and prospect. Here we conclude the theoretical achievements and main findings from the case study of the Yangtze River delta urban agglomeration’s spatial evolution. Furthermore, due to the limit of dataset, some work need to be done in future. Therefore, in the last part of the dissertation, we discusse some relevant issues and the direction in which further study will be carried on.