Study On The Characteristics Of Urban Center System In "Edge City" From The Global City-Regions Perspective

The power of globalization has promoted the rise of China's global city-regions and created the foundation for the development of “edge cities” with Chinese characteristics.In the Yangtze River Delta,Pearl River Delta,Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and other major domestic global city-regions,“edge cities” with distinctive Chinese characteristics have appeared.In a highly “compressed” space-time environment,China's global city-regions as a whole have experienced a unique rapid urbanization process,and under the great influence of the region,the evolution of the urban center system of the "edge city" in the region also presents distinct Chinese characteristics.In the Yangtze River Delta,Pearl River Delta,Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and other major domestic global city-regions have appeared with a distinctive regional brand Fringe cities ".In a highly “compressed” space-time environment,China 's global urban areas as a whole have undergone a unique rapid urbanization process,and under the great influence from the regional scale,the evolution of the urban center system of the “edge cities” within the region has also shown distinctive Chinese characteristics.Domestic scholars have already identified some "edge cities" with Chinese characteristics and conducted a series of studies on their formation mechanisms and characteristics but have not yet penetrated into the spatial structure and spatial evolution characteristics of "edge cities"."Edge cities" are closely related to the industrial development level of the central cities in the same regions and the overall urbanization development stage of the global city-regions where they belong to.Therefore,based on the “time-space compression” environment of China's urbanization process,this article discusses the evolutionary characteristics of "edge cities" in China from the regional perspective of global city-region and demonstrates the relationship between the overall development of the global city-region and the evolution of “edge cities” urban center system within the same region,and form a theoretical explanation that is in line with China's reality.This article is based on the basic logic of the evolution of the urban center system,combined with the theory of global city-region.First,this study sorts out the overall characteristics of the development of China 's global city-regions under the background of space-time compression and the overall development trend of the “edge cities” with Chinese characteristics within the regions.Second,this study analyzes the influencing factors of the evolution of the urban center system of "edge cities" with Chinese characteristics from both urban and regional scale,and then builds an analysis framework of the evolutionary characteristics of the urban central system under the combined action of internal and external influencing factors.Third,this article takes Kunshan,an “edge city” in the suburbs of Shanghai in the Yangtze River Delta Global City-Region as an empirical object,and applies the above analysis framework to analyze how the external influencing factors of the global city-region and endogenous driving factors of Kunshan 's urbanization development work together to affect the evolution of Kunshan's urban center system.Finally,this paper examines the spatial layout,service functions,service levels,and hierarchical structure of Kunshan's urban center system demonstrate the evolutionary characteristics of urban center system of “edge cities” in China with the representative of Kunshan.The study argues that the continuous deepening of the regional division of labor in the global city-region,the iterative update of the infrastructure network,the regionalization of the service of the global cities and the consumption diversion effect of the regional central cities are the main external influencing factors;the employment demographic composition with manufacturing employees as the main part,the industrial development path dominated by the economic developing-areas,the inefficient development of urban transportation system and the relatively chaotic urban space expansion model are the main endogenous influencing factors.Under the combined action of these internal and external factors,Kunshan's urban center system exhibits the evolutionary characteristics of "multi-centers,homogenization,homogenization,and flattening".The spatial distribution of centers is balanced and discrete,the service function shows a clear homogenization trend,the service levels of the urban centers are distinctively homogeneous,and the overall scale structure of the central system is highly flat.The whole thesis contains about 48 000 words,59 pictures and charts.