From Measure To Guidance:the Construction And Assessment Of New-type Urbanization Evaluation System

Currently, the urbanization rate of China has surpassed50%. Yet not long ago, urbanization has become our national strategy. It can not only generate new driving force for economic transition and growth, but also make city a modern, civilized and happy life style. Besides the obviously tense relationship between the expansion of urbanization and the existing public service system, massive city diseases also indicate the hazard that basic target of urbanization and the concept of city civilization may be subverted. The transformation from urbanization to new-type urbanization means a comprehensive understanding of urbanization. New-type urbanization not only concerns the change of population distribution mode in cities and villages, or represents the extension of city territorial scope, but also contains related contents including equality, happiness, health and sustainable development. By contrast, recent urbanization assessment indicators are difficult to embody the connotation of new-type urbanization. Through teasing out the conception of new-type urbanization and analyzing the relevant literature with content analysis method, it’s been revealed that new-type urbanization pays more attention to urban ecological sustainability, transformation of economic development mode, urban livability, equalization of urban service facility, urban culture soft power, etc. Those six elements are identified in our new-type urbanization evaluation model. And the model could be used to form the basic framework of new-type urbanization evaluation system, involving urban ecology civilization, urban service facilities, urban economic sustainability, urban culture prosperity, urban life quality and urban management science. Based on data from11cities in Zhejiang province, new-type urbanization evaluation system is applied to find the problems in urbanization. For example, the subsystems of new-type urbanization develop unevenly, urban economy development is over-emphasized, the urban management and service facility level needs promoting, and the social cultural environment quality is generally low. Furthermore, the proof through canonical correlation analysis shows a positive correlation between natural physical environment quality and social cultural environment quality. In terms of the evaluation system, the main value is not to get the assessment results of urbanization or rankings of cities, but to clarify the conceptual framework of new-type urbanization. Thus, it’s more vital to establish appropriate principles and patterns of people-oriented new-type urbanization as well as element synergy. Furthermore, what should be clear is the multi-dimensional policy orientation in urbanization. This kind of orientation to city development direction should be considered from two sides. On the one hand, the evaluation system frames the urban concepts, such as security, health, coordination and comfort. On the other hand, the new-type urbanization should be distributed rationally with a strategic insight, governed with various methods and provided from a balanced angle. Meanwhile, the chronicity of such orientation couldn’t be neglected.