Study On The Urban Spatial Structure Of Shanghai On The Perspective Of Polycenticity

With the development of urbanization and industrialization, great changes had taken place in the perspective of urban spatial structure. Too many traffic and environmental problems attractted researchers’attention, so that they found out several solutions to solve these problems from theoretical and practical perspective. Poly-centric structure became the appropriate terms of settlement supported by researchers. What’s more, the polycentric spatial structure became the trend of modern urban spatial structure. As one of the biggest cities in China, the case of Shanghai has representativeness to other cities. With the processing of sub-urbanization, the residential and employment function have transferred from downtown to sub-urban area where several sub-centers are forming.The development of urban spatial structure in Shanghai was studied in this research from both static and dynamic perspectives. For static perspective, referring to foreign definition of employment center combining with Shanghai’s practice, the employment centers of different periods in suburban areas of Shanghai were identified with the measure of employment density. In view of dynamic perspective, traffic flow between downtown and sub-urban employment centers was measured. Comparing with POLYNET project in Europe, it could be concluded that Shanghai’s polycentric level was lower than those obvious polycentric area, such as Rhine-Ruhr, Randstad, and South East of England and so on, but higher than such areas as Rhine, Dublin, Belgium and Central and northern Switzerland, therefore, Shanghai was just in the transition stage from mono-centricity to poly-centricity. Along with the consistent perfection of road net and subway, the level of poly-centricity in Shanghai would be promised a further improvement.Several factors contributed to the development of urban spatial structure were analyzed in this thesis, including economic factor, social factor, and policy and planning. It could be summarized that the land system and the transformation of industrial structure were the internal mechanism to promote the spatial structure development, infrastructure and the traffic accessibility were important to the development of polycentric structure, whereas the planning policy played a role of guidance.