| In the past 30 years since the reform and opening up, the construction of urbanization in China has made great achievements. The urbanization level in China has risen from 17.92% in1978 to 44.99% in 2007, the annual speed being 0.93 percent. At present, the urbanization is in the mid-term of acceleration, and the annual speed is over 1 percent. But with more and more problems related to urbanization appearing, including the contradiction between man and nature, the problem of migrant workers, environmental pollution, the destruction of urban heritage, the growing gap between city and the countryside, and the appearance of a new dual structure in city, etc, the importance of urbanization quality has been emphasized and many papers have been published. Previous studies on urbanization paid more attention on"quantity", and the"quality"didn't get enough attention. Today, how to make a radical change to achieve a all-rounded development is much more important than the movement of people from the countryside to cities. While the process is continuing moving forward, the quality needs more concern. Just as the winner of Nobel Prize for Economics Stieglitz has said: the problem is not whether the process of urbanization will come but how it will, which decides the living standard of millions of people in China.United Nations Center for Human Settlement (UNCHS) has made some typical studies on urbanization quality internationally, and evaluation systems include City Development Index (CDI) and Urban Indicators Guidelines. The former one includes infrastructure, waste, health, education, and product, and the latter one includes shelter, social development and eradication of poverty, environmental management, economic development, governance. Ye Yu-min's studies on nine super cities whose population is over 3 million began the quantitative study, and the papers have been on the rise in recent years. There are two kinds of evaluation indexes, one only including the meaning of urbanization, while the other also including the coordination between city and the countryside. The former includes economy, society, life, resources and environment, infrastructure, and the coordination is evaluated by income gap and Engel's Coefficient. Data processing includes principal component analysis and calculating according to cities in developed areas after giving artificial weight. Two kinds of spatial scope focus on one special area or the whole country, but the number of cities is limited. To sum up, both the scope and the depth are not enough.With the method of entropy, the urbanization quality of 286 cities is analyzed. The method of entropy can avoid the subjectivity of artificial weight and the information overlap between indexes, and is widely used in social and economic studies. According to the connotation of urbanization quality, the paper constructs the appraisal index system, including economic development, infrastructure, employment, citizen life, social development, environment, land use quality, innovation quality, and urban-rural gap.The results include:(1)The urbanization quality is not high as a whole. In the classification of urbanization quality according to the grades, the number of the cities of the fifth level is the largest, with the proportion over a quarter. Cities of level three and level four also account for a great proportion, and the percentage is over 66.4 if added by level five. The process of urbanization should be evaluated comprehensively, with the quality being the core, and the aim of urbanization is to build cities into places appropriate for human production and life.(2)The urbanization quality is higher in eastern region, and the costal areas have higher grades compared with the inland. The eastern region has advantages both in the number of cities of the first three levels and in the proportion in different regions. Cities of level three, four and five dominate the central region, and level five and six the western region. The cities of higher urbanization quality are distributed in the form of agglomeration, fitting well with the urban agglomerations in China. Cities in central and western region should draw on the experience in the eastern region during the process of urbanization.(3)The bigger the better is not correct regarding urbanization quality. There is no corresponding relation between urbanization quality and city size, and the quality of many small scaled cities is higher than that of big cities. This means that city development should be coordinated with local conditions, and the process should be human-oriented, serving human production and life, and not pursuing the external scale.(4)Population urbanization level can't reflect urbanization quality. The correspondence between the proportion of non-agricultural population in municipal areas and urbanization quality is low, and more people engaged in non-agriculture don't necessarily lead to the improvement of urbanization quality. Population urbanization is just an aspect of urbanization and deep-level aspects like people's life, employment, education should enough attention after peasants move into cities, giving them not only the ability to move but also develop.(5)The process of urbanization is unbalanced, and many aspects need to be improved. Cities with higher grades have not been developing comprehensively, and employment, ecological environment, urban and rural gap don't develop sufficiently. This means many aspects of the process haven't got enough attention and investment, needing the elimination of the short boards to achieve the comprehensive improvement of urbanization quality. |
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