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| SPATIAL ANALYSES ON ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL ELEMENTS FLOWSIN WUHAN METROPOLITAN AREAS |
| LIU Cheng-liang1,2, LI Jiang-min3, ZHANG Hong4 |
1. Tourism management department of Business school, Hubei University, Wuhan 430062, China;
2. Academy of tourism development, Hubei University, Wuhan 430062, China;
3. Tourism department, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China;
4. Department of land surveying and Geo-informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
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Abstract The process of the economic and geographic development and its evolution caused by economic links and interaction among metropolitan areas has become one of the hot topics and frontiers of the Economic Geography,Urban Geography and Regional Geography studies.The economic links and its interaction in the Metropolitan areas are represented as their social and economic flows between them; these flows include human flow, freight flow, information flow, capital flow, technique and knowledge flow, etc. Studying these flows can well help us uncover the spatial distribution features of market development and evolution in the Metropolitan area. This paper takes Wuhan Metropolitan areas as an example. Firstly, we compute the economic links intensity and the economic attaching degree of each city, with reference to distance and daily accessibility. We define the scope of Wuhan Metropolitan areas as "3 circles 15 cities". Then based on the analysis of the urban functional effect, we construct the urban flow model as F=NE and give out the definition of each variable. We also compute the tendency and intensity of urban economic and social element flows in Wuhan Metropolitan areas.It is found out that:1) the spatial difference between central city's economic and social elements flows in Wuhan Metropolitan Areas is distinct; 2) the external economic links takes on notable Zipf rule and it has formed the "saddle-backed" spatial structure which the intensity of the economic and social links among Wuhan city. The periphery of Wuhan metropolitan areas is larger than the inside track. Finally, we investigate the spatial distribution characteristics of the economic links of cities in Wuhan Metropolitan areas. Using SPSS, we analyze the passenger transport flow, human migration flow, in formation flow, capital flow and so on of each city statistically, through the experiential analysis, some important rules are opened up:1) the passenger transport links intensity decreases according to it's distance to central city, thus forms a hierarchical and layered structure; 2)most people are inclined to migrate to Wuhan city, which has formed three regression circle with hierarchy, while the inter-city information flow is not impacted by distance so much, and it is closely correlated to its economic development level and represents some layered structure characters; 3) the technique and capital flows are also likely to agglomerate to Wuhan city. Capital flow is closely related to city's economic size; 4) In a word, It is quite obvious that Wuhan city has become the agglomerating and distributing centre of the economic and social elements flows during the whole metropolitan areas. It has a close economic and social relationship with other cities. Moreover, the urban economic and social element flow into Wuhan city takes on the radial spatial structure with hierarchy to some extent. Further research can be done on the spatial distribution characters of power flow such as electricity, gas, coal and so on, and deep analysis can be carried out on how the native culture may affect the in ter economic links of Metropolitan area from the aspects of its history and culture.
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Received: 09 November 2006
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2007, Vol. 22 
