A Research Into Qingdao's Urbunization: Problems And Solutions

Urbanization has conceptualized for over 100 years. Generally speaking, urbanization refers to a process wherein with the development of social productive forces, cities and towns grow in both their amount and scale with a centralized population, a constant expansion of city civilization and culture and a continuous transforming of the regional industrial structure. Urbanization is also a process wherein an economy transforms fundamentally in both its fundamentals and structure. Through a comprehensive review of the relevant theoretical studies and articles in both China and abroad and employing the relevant theories in such studies of regional economics, urban geography, economics and sociology and such methodologies as comparative analysis, empirical analysis, inductions and deductions and a combination of theories and practices, this dissertation intends to present against the status quo of Qindao's urbanization an overall and systematic analysis of the history, characteristics and existing problems of the city's urbanization to build up a scientific platform for the development of and innovations in the city's urbanization process to give suggestions related thereto.The dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter I is introduction and general statement, stating mainly the basic theories of urbanization such as the concept of urbanization, measurement of a city's urbanization, a literature review of urbanization studies in both China and abroad, and the problems this dissertation intends to address and the significance of such a study.Chapter II is about the history, status quo and characteristics of Qingdao's urbanization. It reviews the history of Qindao's urbanization from two perspectives, presents an objective analysis of the status quo of the city's urbanization with massive data, and summarizes the characteristics of such process.Chapter III reviews the problems in Qingdao's urbanization with analyses of the causes of such problems. Deep analyses of these problems reveal that systematic and structural causes are the main obstacles to the city's urbanization.Chapter IV gives suggestions about Qingdao's urbanization. Based on the above analyses, it raises eight practicable suggestions for a scientific development of the city's urbanization. As of the end of 2006, Qingdao had got an urbanization rate of 63.6%, which falls into the latter stage of the internationally recognized fast-developing period ranging from 30% to 60%. With massive data, this dissertation presents an innovative analysis of Qingdao's urbanization from the four perspectives of urbanization in economy, population, life style and residential environment to get an objective idea of the city's urbanization, and reveals further that the incoherence between development speed and quality with quality lagging relatively behind the fast speed and the incoherence between urbanization and industrialization with the former falling behind the latter are the two outstanding problems in Qingdao's urbanization process. Although the city takes the lead in Shandong Province in all the indicators, its development has not got in line with its position and its lead and influence in the region has not been given a comfortable play, all of which, in turn, restricts the further development of Qingdao's urbanization. The above are the innovations in this dissertation and the author's unique findings with massive data.