Research On The Spatial Dispersion Of Megalopolises And Development Strategy Of New Towns

Cities are the cores of regional economic development, while megalopolises are the powerful engines. The scale of cites is closely related to their boosting roles in regional economic development. However, accompanied with cities'overscale, over-agglomeration of socio-economic factors is generally produced otherwise, which results in urban problems in megalopolises, such as traffic congestion, high population density, environmental pollution and spatial sprawl. To tackle the urban troubles, the construction of new towns has become an important development strategy for many countries and regions around the world.As China's largest city, Shanghai has construsted new towns early since 1940s. However, there are no radical changes to the inner city's chronic problems such as irrational urban structure and excessive concentration of population and industry so far. At the same time, other megalopolises and cities have been enthusiastic in building new towns in recent years. Therefore, it is practically essential for us to summarize, analyze and judge the actual effect and applicability of new towns in order to promote the rational development of megalopolises and cities.After a general review of theory development and practices of new towns world-wide, this thesis studies the effect that new towns take to megalopolises'spatial dispersion.This article concludes that:new towns restrain the inflow of population to inner city, but can seldom prevent the outflow of population from inner city; new towns alleviate the excessive concentration of megalopolises somehow,while bringing about some other problems on the other hand; it is hard to draw consistent conclusion and rating on new towns'roles and fuctions to the spatial dispersion of megalopolises since they have different results in developed and developing countries. New towns will do some use to megalopolises on the following conditions:developed urban economy, prevalent suburbanization, strict management of land development, relatively centralized governmental organization, adequate and diversified industries.Futhermore, based on questionnaire surveys and spot investigation taken both in inner city and songjiang new town in shanghai, this paper summarizes and analyses the present situation and troubles of shanghai's new towns, songjiang new town included, in the dispersion of population and industry, and housing and employment. Aamongst the study, the problems involved with new towns'development are specially emphasized as the following:irrational function orientation, inadequate industry support, lack of legislation and laws, lag in construsting rail transit, poor advertising and promoting of new towns etc.And finally, some policies and suggestions concerned are put forward accordingly.