Research On The Evolution And Driving Factors Of Urban Network Structure In The Yellow River Basin From The Perspective Of Enterprise Connections

Urban network is a hot spot of attention in human geography and urban planning in recent years.Some scholars have already analyzed the structure and spatial organization pattern of urban network from a single perspective of enterprise connection,information flow,population flow and traffic flow,etc.The general patterns and influence factors of the evolution of urban network are still issues that need to be studied in depth.With the development of evolutionary economic geography,it has become a new theoretical proposition to analyze the influencing factors and driving mechanisms of the evolution of urban network structure from a multidimensional proximity perspective.In the context of increasing networking of regional connections,it is vital to deepen the theoretical cognition of urban network formation and development mechanism by integrating two perspectives of internal and external connections based on enterprise big data to reveal the laws and driving factors of urban network structure evolution.The Yellow River Basin is the main grain producing area,and also an important energy,raw material and chemical base,but in the long-term development process exposed a large gap among the upstream,midstream,and downstream development levels,low agglomeration of urban clusters,weak radiation drive,single industrial structure and other problems,coupled with the fragile ecological base,the ecological problems accompanying the development of the basin are more prominent,which makes the ecological protection and high quality development of the Yellow River Basin has become a national strategy.The high-quality development requires close collaboration among cities within the basin,and business linkages,as an important form of urban economic interaction,can strongly promote regional synergy and development.Based on enterprise linkages,we analyze the evolutionary process and drivers of urban networks to help analyze the problems in the development of Yellow River Basin and provide targeted policy recommendations.Taking the Yellow River Basin as the research area,this article provides an in-depth analysis of the structure and evolution of urban networks,changes in urban node types,and the division of network communities in the Yellow River Basin from 2000-2020 from two perspectives: internal and external corporate linkages based on corporate headquarters branch data and corporate investment linkage data,respectively,and analyzes the influencing factors of urban network evolution in four aspects: geographic proximity,institutional proximity,social proximity,and cognitive proximity by drawing on the multidimensional proximity index of evolutionary economic geography,and finally proposes policy recommendations to promote spatial integration and high quality in the basin.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The urban network has been developing continuously,among which the branch network of corporate headquarters is developing faster than the investment network.(2)The spatial polarization of network node intensity is significant and hierarchical,and the overall distribution pattern is high in the southeast and low in the northwest.(3)The network axes and hierarchical characteristics are significant,and the network links are strong in the southeast and weak in the northwest.The branch network of corporate headquarters forms a star-shaped radial skeleton with Qingdao,Jinan,Zhengzhou and Xi’an as the center,and the cross-province linkage is weak.The investment network has an"axis and spoke" distribution pattern,with a large number of secondary and tertiary links and cross-provincial links,and a wide coverage of enterprise investment links.(4)According to the values of degree centrality and betweenness centrality,Qingdao,Jinan,Zhengzhou and Xi’an belong to“high-high”cities,which is the common "hub" and "bridge" of the two types of networks."The transformation rate of"low-low" and "high-low" nodes to "high-high" nodes is higher in the headquarters branch network.(5)Headquarters branch network communities are influenced by border barrier effect,neighborhood effect and spillover effect,showing the evolution trend of "clustering first,then integration",and the investment network is mainly influenced by border barrier effect and neighborhood effect,and the degree of clustering is increasing(6)Geographic proximity,institutional proximity and social proximity have positive effects on the development of both types of city networks,while cognitive proximity plays a negative inhibitory role in the headquarters branch network and has no significant effect in the enterprise investment network.There are two innovative points in this article: First,the study based on industry-wide enterprise big data is an extension of the previous research on the network structure of advanced productive service industries and listed companies based on limited sample size.Second,a comparative exploration of urban network evolution based on headquarters branch data and investment data from two perspectives of internal and external linkages of enterprises can compensate for the one-sidedness of research from a single enterprise internal perspective or external perspective,and can complement the urban network research results from the enterprise perspective.