Study On Assessment China’s Urban Human Settlements

City is one of the main human settlements in the world. Since the United Nations’ report "Global Report on Human Settlements 1996:An Urbanizing World" was released, the study of urban human settlements has been widely concerned. Since the Reform and Opening Up policy, China’s urbanization is becoming one of the fastest among the world, which has a profound impact on the development of China’s urban human settlements. While at the same time, the rapid urbanization process has stimulated a lot of economic, social and environmental problems which reflect in the following areas:First, China’s rapid urbanization was built on extensive economic growth, which means building up an innovation-oriented society and information society still has a long way to go; Second, Urban-rural dual structure still exists and will last for a while because of the hukou registration system; Third, the rapid urbanization has resulted in resources and environmental pressures; Fourth, regional disparities has become a huge problem in the process of China’s urbanization. According to all these problems, study of urban human settlements must start from the concept of sustainable development and the aim of all the studies should focus on solving the problems occurred during the urbanization process.This paper can be divided into 7 chapters:chapter 1 and chapter 2 are the introduction and theory, chapter 3 to chapter 5 are the three aspects of empirical research of China’s urban human settlements, chapter 6 is comprehensive evaluation of China’s urban human settlements and chapter 7 is about the conclusions and countermeasures.Chapter 1:introduction. In this chapter, the general information of urban human settlements are introduced, including the research background, the basic concepts, the research progress and commentary, the research content and research design, research methods, the data and the main innovation of this paper.Chapter 2:theoretical basis. In this chapter, related theory such as the sustainable development theory, urban social theory and the urban human settlements scientific theory are reviewed. And the paper’s theoretical framework is proposed on the basis of the study of UN-HABITAT, World Health Organization and other relative researches. As a result of the open, giant and complex system of human settlements, it is necessary to focus the research on several main aspects:housing, environment and public services in this paper. Also the geographic space-time analysis tools have been used as an important research method.Chapter3:evaluation of China’s urban living conditions. In this chapter, the evolution process of China’s urban living conditions has been reviewed. After the research of the urban residence spatial pattern, result shows disadvantaged groups still exist in a certain scale. Taking Shanghai as an example, since 1949 its evolution process of living conditions have experienced "housing problem of the whole city-the native conditions improvement-the housing problem of migrants/the minority living problem". Also the result of an investigation on Shanghai’s urban village shows individual family factor is the main factor affecting the living conditions.Chapter 4:evaluation of China’s urban environmental quality. In this chapter, China’s environmental pollution process has been elaborated. And the theories of Environmental Kuznets and A mode, B mode and C mode are used to explain nowadays’ urban pollution in China. A database of 161 cities’urban air qualities have been built after the research of the data released by environmental protection department. Further quantitative analyze results show that 161 cities’ AQI have displayed a "high in north, low in south" pattern since 1981, without denying the fact that the whole country is heavily polluted. The pollution can be explained from different angles such as direct pollution sources, major events, topography and climate. And another quantitative analyze results shows industrial smoke (powder) dust emission has a dramatic impact on AQI:every ton industrial smoke can make the AQI rise by 9.25%-9.70%.Chapter 5:evaluation of China’s urban infrastructure and public services. China’s urban infrastructure and public services evaluation database has been constructed. And, methods like entropy method, Nich index, ESDA, the concentration index and GINI coefficient are used to measure the spatial pattern and development situation of infrastructure and public services. The results show that urban infrastructure is always "lumpy" distributed, but the concentration degree becomes smaller; and the same goes for the public services development. Taking Shanghai’s infrastructure development as an example, the result shows that Shanghai’s Infrastructure Carrying Pressure (ICP) has experienced the progress of "down-up-down". Shanghai’s ICP changing pattern can be explained by the following reasons:geographical location, Open-up and Development of Shanghai Pudong, rapid urbanization, major events (Expo) and so on.Chapter 6:comprehensive evaluation of China’s urban human settlements. Based on the review of the existed criteria of urban human settlement evaluation, the paper endeavors to build up a new synthesis evaluation index system, which will be used to evaluate 36 cities in China, considering the living conditions, the quality of the urban environment, infrastructure and public services and other factors.Chapter 7:conclusions and countermeasures. After the evaluation of China’s human settlements development, there comes to the conclusions as follows:First, China’s urban living conditions has been dramatically improved, while at the same time the rising housing price and housing problems of the disadvantaged groups are still existed; Second, China’s urban environmental pollution problem is serious. The PRED model shows the air quality in the north is significantly different from that in the south. The spatial pattern of pollution remains to be " high in north, low in south " since 1981; Third, the gap of infrastructure and public services between the cities is narrowed down, while the giant cities like Shanghai are really overloaded; Fourth, the 36 evaluated cities’ human settlements overall scores display significantly gradient difference, which shows the more developed the economy, the relatively higher level of urban human settlements there will be. The pattern can be seen from the correlation coefficient between the urban living environment overall score and GDP,0.620. Based on the related human settlements theories, the existing problems and the principles of sustainable environmental development, several suggestions are proposed to settle the human settlements problems.