Seeking Urbanization Through Non-balanced But Coordinated Development

China has now entered the middle part of its industrializing process as well as the accelerating period of its urbanization. Seeking urbanization through non-balanced but coordinated development and advancing the construction of a well-off society are not only a decision based on the domestic and foreign experiences and lessons, but also the direction pointed out by Deng Xiaoping's thought on the "two general situations".Natural transition from polarity to balance will not necessarily happen as anticipated by the "reversed U" theory. Instead, the transition demands reasonable frameworks and paths for the overall development. The development should be advanced through combination of governmental guidance and market mechanism and with clear foci.Economic rules indicate that the cities in a geographically advantageous region tend to form an urban agglomeration in their development, which has a purpose to seek comparative advantages and economies of scale and is driven by the dynamic mechanism formed through gathering and scattering of resources and productive factors. An agglomeration comprises a central city as its core, which should be economically advanced and have rather strong urban functions, and a number of cities around it, which are geographically adjacent to or have close economic relations with the core city.There are two ways for urban expansion. One is ring-shaped extension, which is also called the "pancake" way, and the other is development of urban clusters withmultiple centers, including construction of development areas, building new residential areas or new towns along with transference of industries, and disseminating certain urban functions to neighboring minor towns so as to help them to grow into satellite towns, which results in an integrated group of cities and towns reflecting the administrative intention. The former way is the "central place" mode typical of early stages of urban development and, when the city reaches certain scale, will culminate in a series of difficult problems that the city itself can hardly solve, such as traffic congestion, uncomfortable environment, overburdened downtown, and restrictions to the functional sections. In the perspective of sustainable development, the urban expansion will necessarily turn to the mode of developing urban clusters with multiple centers. In the latter way, the first phase for urban agglomeration, a metropolitan area, will be achieved. Within the scope of the influences of the metropolitan, a number of medium and small towns will realize rapid development and extend their borders toward the metropolitan area.As for a single city, an urban agglomeration also entails conglomeration diseconomy. This "diseconomy" of the agglomeration has its root in its structural irrationalness in scale, function and space, as well as the component cities' failure to orchestrate their efforts through their effective competition, cooperation and coordination to solve their common problems and maximize their collective interests. Against the backdrop of accelerating economic globalization, regional integrity, and informatization of industrialization, the development of urban agglomerations takes multiple dimensions and enjoys barrier-free connections. Especially the advanced transportation systems and information transmission systems have greatly quickened their intercity flow of commodities, capital, technology, talent and culture, forming a network of division of labor, complementation, exchange and competition. It is the need for deepening the meaning of urban agglomeration development to take a further step from the original development of urban agglomerations to building urban networks. This process sees both the organizational functions of the cities themselves as well as the planning functions of the government, and expresses thecities' wish to achieve common success and prosperity through integration of resources and systematic coordination.To realize networked economy, it is not necessary for those vast non-advantageous areas to follow the traditional road of developing urban agglomeration. In an economic network, the cities at various nodes of the network share the resources and information within and outside. The city that has a stronger ability to grasp opportunities will have a larger space for outward development. In such a network, a city's position in the area depends on not only its scale and economic functions, but also its function as a linking node of the syndicated network. For non-advantageous and outlying areas, the rational way to realize networked economy is to receive the influences of the dense urban belts and act in accordance with the multiple networks for flow of productive factors. This signifies the third stage of regional economy, going from non-balanced development to coordinated development. Correspondingly, urbanization progresses from the basic form to the advanced form, namely, from the centralized urban networks to the whole-region urban network.