A Study On The Spatio-Temporal Dynamics Of City-Size Distribution In Yangtze River Delta

Along with the development of economic globalization and regional integration, extensive economic connections have established the framework of the urban network. People are more convinced that the city cluster development is a trend than ever before, some people even said bluntly,’The21st century is the century of urbanization, rather than the century of economic globalization; the future of the international competition is not only the competition of science and technology, but also the contest of regional urban agglomerations.’As one of China’s three biggest urban agglomerations, Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration has strong economic radiation. However, it’s very important to have a reasonable city size structure for a city group; thus it is necessary to study the development of the current city size structure of Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration. For the government management departments, our research will give the city system planning help, and it also provides a reference for alleviating the city’s population pressure and environmental stress.This paper takes the prefecture-level cities of Pan-Yangtze River Delta region as a case, combined with the methods of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, the city size structure of Yangtze River Delta urban system was studied, from the angle of geography and statistics. The research mainly studies the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of the city size structure of the Yangtze River Delta urban system in two aspects of the overall distribution of the urban size structure and the changes in the rank of individual city. All in all, this thesis includes the following five parts:Chapter One starts with an introduction of the background, purpose, the object and innovations of this study, etc. This chapter also reviewed the domestic and international relevant research, and found that most previous studies ignored the spatial dependency between different cities. In order to make up for the defects, I put forward the innovation in this paper.Chapter Two presents the basic theory and methods involved in this study. First of all, it’s a review on the basic theory about the city-size distribution thus provides the thesis with a theoretical and practical foundation. Secondly, this paper provides some measurement methods of city-size distribution which without considering the spatial correlation effects among the urban system. Thirdly, based on the spatial correlation effects, some spatial statistical analysis methods are introduced.The third chapter is one of the most important empirical analysis chapters. This part evaluated overall city-size distribution of the urban system using Primacy index, Gini coefficient and Concentration index. Then I used spatial statistical methods to improve the’rank-size rule’and estimated the Zipf index. At the same time, the changes in the rank of the individual city size were evaluated with the methods of Markov chain and ’Rank Clock’.The main content of Chapter Four is to predict the population distribution of the Yangtze River Delta region. Through the improvement of Rescaled Range Analysis, I applied it to the time-series analysis of the overall city-size distribution, and found the evolution trend of urban system in the Yangtze River Delta.Finally, a conclusion of the dissertation and some future research topics in the field are given in Chapter Five.