The Mechanism For The Influence Of Industrial Clusters On Urban Space

The past half century has witnessed the emergency of a large quantity of local industrial clusters worldwide, which reflected the global industrial division from a micro perspective. Industrial clusters have soon aroused worldwide interest in interdisciplinary academic research. Since the 1990s, a large number of small and medium-sized enterprise clusters have sprung out locally in the coastal area of China, to which domestic scholars began to attach great importance. It can’t be denied that industrial clusters have promoted greatly the development of local economy and towns, even attributed to some specialized towns with urban functions and a population of hundreds of thousands. However, such situation that industries vitalize towns is challenged by international crisis. The change of global economic climate and value chains is getting down the local industrial clusters which obtain price advantage by factor inputs. Faced with great pressures, industrial clusters need to transform and upgrade to turn around the passive situation of low-end locking and racing to the bottom. After taking industries as their driving forces for a long period, how can these towns work in return?In order to get the answers, we should make clear the relationship between industrial clusters and the development of towns. This paper is one of the researches that focus on part of the relationship, namely the impact of industrial clusters on the towns. In the fact, researches on industrial clusters mainly follow the paradigm of economics, few of which involve the issue of space. Based on a perspective of space, this paper studies the impacts of industrial clusters on towns and the effect mechanisms, specifically "what aspects are affected" "how these effects work" and "how will the effects develop", so as to take proactive measures to promote a collaborative development of industries and towns.The paper begins with theoretical review, goes on with case analysis and inductive ascension, and then ended with research application. We take the industrial clusters of machine processing in the town of Bowang in Ma’anshan City as an example, which is famous for its blade mould and machine tools. Through literature retrieval, data collection, questionnaire, interview and on-site investigation, the paper reviewed the development progress of this case and then divided it into different stages. It also elaborated the proceeding-phase characteristics of environment, impetus and town space, attempting to conclude the effect mechanism of the industrial clusters on town space so as to make scientific cluster strategy and rational space planning.The chapters are arranged as below. The first chapter is introduction. It comes up with the theme and content based on research background and also gives out the layout of approach, data resources and research thoughts. The second chapter is review and theoretical study. It reviews the theories of industrial clusters and researches on industry-town mutual relationship and also studies the analysis framework of town space. The third chapter is case study. It divides the progress into different stages according to the characteristics of external environment, internal impetus and space performance and then studies different stages. It also analyzes the characteristics of town space from the perspective of overall shape, function structure and spatial pattern, and then generalizes the historical development of industrial clusters and town space.The forth chapter is mechanism study. It puts forward three mechanisms to urge, intensify and express the impacts of overall layout, function and space. It also studies how the mechanism works and tries to give a preliminary explanation from the perspective of arranging the production elements. The fifth chapter is research application. It discusses the future development of impact mechanism from the perspective of updating the industrial clusters and optimizing the town space. The sixth chapter is research conclusion. It reviews the achievements, innovation points and deficiencies of this research and then outlooks the direction of future researches.