Investigate The Connection Between CBD And City Development

CBD is the nucleus of a city. As a part of the city, the whole city's evolution plays an important role in the evolution of the CBD. In the other hand, the development of CBD plays an important role in the development of the city too. Generally, CBD is the soul and the development platform of the city. And the spatial structure of the city changes as the CBD retreats or expands in some directions. Many municipal governments in China tend to plan and construct CBDs without totally understanding the exact meaning of CBD. Depending on reviewing researches that have been done before, the author argues that CBD is the spatial core of the city, and generally it comprises concentrations of retailing, office buildings, administration, culture and so on. Therefore almost every city could build a CBD. But at the same time we should be aware of the differences between different cities, especially big cities, small cities and middle-sized cities. The function of CBDs of middle-sized cities or small cities could be mainly composed of retailing, and contain hotels, theaters and office quarters at the same time. In the second part of this paper (including chapter 3, 4 and 5), in order to further explain the differences of function and size of big, middle-sized and small cities, the author mainly investigates the connection between CBDs and the development of cities, and then points out that there is no necessary for us to discuss the qualification of cities to build CBDs, but to understand that the function and size of CBDs are restricted by the economy and location of different cities. To distinguish the function and size differences, the author suggests that we should adopt the concept of "CBD ranking system". In the second part of the paper, the author also suggests that polycentric structure has emerged in some big cities of China due to suburbanization. But in the latter part of the paper the author suggests that solo-centric structure will still be the main development style of middle-sized and small cities in China, because of the interaction of agglomeration and decentralization.