City Network In Digital Times

Today when "Peace and Development" is the theme of the time, economic sustainable development has been put to the frontier of research. Being the center of living and commercial activity, cities are important to study. Advancement of productivity brought cities, which vary from internal structures, functional constitutions, interactions and region space-filling models in different economic times. According to J.Friedmann, city space-filling developing models can be divided into four phases that are low-level balance phase, polar nucleus development phase, concentration-proliferation phase and high-level network development phase. Knowledge economy in digital time will especially make a far-reaching effect on city development and alter the functions and space forms of cities. SOHO (solo office & home office) created recent years is a typical example in which living and working functions have been combined together and working and managing functions have been separated. Cities in SOHO's sense will characterize in a kind of network structure that is to be decentralized totally and comprehensive individually as developed communication and transportation have made it possible to have a scattered big city network. Someone has even declared that in the advanced communication time, city-town network will displace the big cities which is becoming more and more difficult to manage. As one of the most developed economic regions, Pearl River Delta has staged into a high-level industrializing time. According to region development models, it is moving from growth pole model and point-axis model to network development model. Starting from the present city network of Pearl River Delta, the paper discusses about how to make the city network of the region advanced and puts forward some measures. There are two purposes of writing this paper. One is to do some positivist research on the city development of Pearl River Delta and the other is to provide a optional development model which could be helpful to make decisions to develop the regional economy.