The Evaluation On The Urbanization Quality Of Cities At Prefecture Level And Above In China

Urbanization has the great potential to promote China’s economic and social development. At the same time, it’s a necessary stage for China to achieve its modernization. At present, China’s urbanization has been growing fast with an increasing scale of urban population which makes up above 50 percent of the national total. However, the extension development of urbanization which means only quick improvement in quantity but not quality has caused some urban disease which contains resources shortage, environment pollution, traffic congestion and so on. Therefore, the development of urbanization includes not only the increase in quantity but also the improvement of quality. The Plan of China’s New-type Urbanization(2014-2020) points out that China’s urbanization must enter a new stage of transformation and development when it pay more attention to improve the quality and try to achieve the steady improvement of urbanization level. Therefore, this research on the quality of urbanization has practical significance. On the basis of the review of previous studies, this paper tries to solve two problems. The first one is to make an evaluation on current urbanization level and the second one is how to improve China’s urbanization level. It is expected that this research can provide theoretical supports for policy making of China’s urbanization.Firstly, this thesis studies literature about evaluation of urbanization quality and defines the connotations of urbanization quality and its influential factors, then sets a multi-dimension urbanization quality evaluation index system which based on urban development level and urbanization efficiency, and consisted of 7 second grade indicators and 28 third grade indicators. Secondly, this paper evaluates urbanization quality in 289 prefecture-level cities in 2013 using factor analysis method, and analyzes from aspect of level, space and size. The result shows that higher level and greater size of the city, the higher urbanization quality. And urbanization quality is higher in the east than in the middle and west. On this basis, this paper classifies all 289 cities into four categories and analyze urbanization quality of representatives of various types. It represents that different cities have common urbanization problems. Finally, the main influencing factor of urbanization quality are studied from perspective on dimensional dynamic model, and suggestions on the improvement of the urbanization quality are proposed.It’s found that the development of Chinese urbanization is unbalanced and there are problems such as the disharmony of urban-rural development and the declining quality of living environment. Therefore, to solve the current problems encountered in the process of urbanization and achieve the healthy development of urbanization, the following aspects need to be concerned:firstly, the internal force is the primary concern, which means the people-oriented urbanization should be promoted. Secondly, there is necessity to pay attention to market power and government power and strengthen the coordination and interaction between different types of cities by using economic and administrative means. Thirdly, the external force should be made use of, especially the foreign investment. This paper’s conclusions and suggestions help solve problems encountered in the process of urbanization, improve the quality of urbanization and provide supports to the goal of increasing the number of cities and towns and enhancing the quality of urbanization.