Comprehensive Urbanization

China has been using merely the rate of urbanization to measure urbanization level until now although it has been a consensus for a long time that urbanization is an integrated phenomenon. This leads to a lack of complete understanding on urbanization and restricts the interdisciplinary research on it. Besides it is a bottleneck for rational policy-making. Nowadays Eastern World especially China is in high speed urbanization process. China’s urbanization rate reached 50 percent in 2011 which means the population living in urban area is larger than that in rural area. After the 18th CPC National Congress " New Type Urbanization" becomes a national strategy, which requires us to measure urbanization level from a comprehensive perspective, to evaluate its quantity and quality levels comprehensively, to explore the dynamic mechanism, to find out the law of evolution and spatial distribution, so as to provide a more rational basis for decision making.This paper decompose urbanization into four sections, namely, demographic section, spatial section, economic section and social section, and established a comprehensive evaluation index system to measure urbanization level. In the paper information entropy method was used. The data of 17 cities in Anhui province in 2000,2005 and 2010 has been used to analyze the quality, quantity and mechanism of urbanization. The paper can be divided into four parts, or eight chapters:The first part introduces the background, theoretical framework and literature review. This section contains the first and the secend chapter of the paper. The former introduces the background from the global and domestic perspective and briefly describes the significance and purpose of this study. The latter summarize literature on the comprehensive level of urbanization and literature on urbanization coordination. It is found that previous studies mainly focu on eastern China,such as Jiangsu, Fujian, Shandong, Beijing and so on. Research on the central China is few.The second part is the research methods and research objects, including Chapters III and IV. Chapter III describes the construction and usage of the comprehensive measure system on urbanization. Structural analysis method of comprehensive urbanization. Coordination measuring method and coordinated development level measuring method are also described in detail. The fourth chapter briefly describes the basic situation of the urbanization in Anhui from demographic, spatial, economic and social perspective. The urbanization of Anhui province is in middle level compared with other province in China, but the gap is narrowing.The third part is the main part of the paper, including the fifth chapter to chapter VII. This part shows the detailed results on spatial distribution and temporal evolution principles, structure evolution characteristics, the degree of coordination and coordinated development level from three different scale, namely the provincial scale, regional scale and city scale. In chapter five, it is found that both the comprehensive level of urbanization and four dimensions in 17cities are improving, with the gap between the 17cities expanding significantly. In chapter six, it is showed that the proportion of population urbanization and space urbanization is larger than economic urbanization and social urbanization, while the latter two contribute more than the former two to the growth of comprehensive level of urbanization. Chapter seven shows that the coordination of the 17 cities are all high while the coordinated development level is generally in middle level.The fourth part is the end. It mainly summarizes the research conclutions and innovartion points in the study, and proposes research prospects..