A Study Of The Economic Elasticity Of Shrinking Cities And Towns

Cities have become the basic spatial bearers of modern civilization as industrialization went global.In the second half of the 20 th century,a storm of "urban shrinkage" began to spread,and we had to face the act that urban shrinkage has become increasingly common worldwide.China,now at a stage of accelerated urbanization,is also confronted with the closely watched issue of "urban shrinkage" with in-depth adjustment of demographic structure and industrial structure,coupled with more external risks and unstable factors.Does urban shrinkage mean decline?What forces will dominate the future development of the shrinking towns and cities?Why are some towns and cities able to cope with the impact of the shrinkage to achieve adjustment and transformation,while others sink into depression because of“path reliance”? These questions need to be studied in depth.Following the logical line of "raising,analyzing and solving the problem" and from both theoretical and empirical angels,this dissertation discusses the essential attributes,evolutionary mechanisms,major influences and the path of strengthening the resilience of contracting towns and cities.Firstly,based on the review of related literature at home and abroad,the core concepts of towns,shrinking towns and economic resilience of shrinking towns are identified and defined,and the main theoretical supports such as the idea of evolutionary resilience embedded in Marxism,the theory of evolutionary economics on innovation and institutional change,and the theory of urban development and spatial evolution are sorted out.On the basis of relevant theories,the theoretical issues related to shrinking towns and cities such as the necessity of strengthening the economic resilience,the essential attributes and components,the evolutionary mechanism and main influences are discussed in depth,and the main analytical framework of the article is constructed.With the theoretical analysis,the scientific identification of shrinking towns in the Chengdu-Chongqing region is carried out,their economic resilience levels are comprehensively assessed,and the main factors affecting the economic resilience of shrinking towns are verified by using macro statistical data and micro survey data.Finally,the main policy suggestions for strengthening the economic resilience of shrinking towns and cities in the Chengdu-Chongqing region are put forward after fully drawing on the governance experience of shrinking cities abroad.The main research findings of this dissertation are as follows:(1)The three-dimensional identification model of "total volume-densitystructure" reveals that 54.8% of the 157 cities and counties(districts)in the Chengdu-Chongqing region are facing the shrinkage problem,but highly shrinking towns and cities only account for 10.2%.The main reason for the shrinkage is not the absolute decrease of urban resident population,but the incompatible human-land relationship,with 46.5% of the towns showing a significant decrease in spatial density.There are other reasons such as serious structural imbalance of population,the loss of talents with college education or above in nearly 80% of the towns and severe aging problem.The spatial distribution of shrinking towns in ChengduChongqing region is strongly correlated,and shrinking towns are concentrated and distributed in central Chengdu-Chongqing region.(2)The average economic resilience level of shrinking towns in ChengduChongqing region has a fluctuating and rising tendency,but it is still at a low level,and the resilience level varies greatly within cities.Of the the three-system resilience level of economic factors,social environment and natural environment,the second and the third are obviously weak.There is a correlation between the degree of contraction of towns and the level of economic resilience,and in general,the level of economic resilience is higher in towns with a slight degree of contraction.Differences in the size,function and geographical location of towns and cities also have an impact on the level of economic resilience.(3)The obstacle degree model analysis shows that the main obstacle factor in the guideline layer of the economic resilience evaluation index system of shrinking towns in the Chengdu-Chongqing region is the social environment system,but the obstacle degree of the economic factor system and the natural environment system has an increasing tendency year by year.The 5 highest obstacle degrees of each obstacle factor in the index layer are science and technology innovation,informationization level,city’s outward linkage,energy consumption level,and fiscal expenditure structure,respectively.What is different from the theoretical analysis is that the barrier degree of three factors,namely,advanced industrial structure,rationalization and diversification,is lower in the contracting towns of Chengdu and Chongqing,which may be related to the "inflation" industrial structure.(4)In this dissertation,demographic stability is used as a supplementary dimension to measure the economic resilience level of shrinking towns.Through the analysis of data collected from questionnaires,it is found that after controlling the differences in household and individual factors of the mobile population,economic factors such as income level and employment opportunities still influence the stability of the population in shrinking towns,while factors such as living environment,public services,cultural identity,social network,and city level are increasing in their influences.(5)Based on the relevant governance experiences from abroad,this dissertation proposes to strengthen the rigid constraints of planning to optimize the spatial basis of economic resilience of shrinking towns.It also puts forward the idea of stabilizing the development of real economy to enhance the key support of economic resilience of shrinking towns,enhancing the level of new urbanization to consolidate the bearing platform of economic resilience of shrinking towns,responding to the general trend of demographic transformation to shape the core driving force of economic resilience of shrinking towns and coordinating the development and security to build a solid foundation for economic resilience of shrinking towns.The dissertation also proposes differentiated suggestions in accordance with different regions,different functions and different size and class of towns.The innovative points of this dissertation are as follows:(1)Economic resilience is taken as an important perspective to study the transformation and development of shrinking towns,and a complete framework of theoretical analysis of economic resilience in shrinking towns is constructed.The PAT(Pressure-Adjustment-Transformation)cycling model is put forward,and its dynamic evolution mechanism and important influencing factors are analyzed in depth,which expands and deepens the theory and practice of previous studies.(2)The multi-dimensional spatial data is combined with the deep learning remote sensing intelligent interpretation platform of natural resources to automatically extract the data of physical town boundary in the Chengdu-Chongqing region.This helps solve the problem of the dis coordination of the spatial scope of towns and population census data in the study of shrinking towns in China to a certain extent,and realizes the separation of the spatial boundaries of physical towns and administrative towns.(3)Multi-angle and multi-level research on the factors influencing the economic resilience of shrinking towns has been completed and a questionnaire survey has been conducted on more than 1,000 drifting population for three consecutive years based on the analysis of macro statistical data.With these research and survey,a logit model analysis has been conducted on the main factors influencing the demographic stability in shrinking towns to complement and expand the analytical perspective of urban economic resilience measurement research.