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| ANALYSIS ON THE EVOLUTIONARY CHARACTERISTICS AND DEVELOPMENT TRENDS OF REOURCE-BASED CITIES IN CHINA |
| XIAO Jin-song, MAO Feng |
| Department of Environmental Sciences, College of Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China |
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Abstract Resource-based cities are those cities that emerged and grew up from their local nature resource exploitation, having special functions of exporting raw resource products to other regions. There are a lot of cities like these in China. They made much contribution to China's development. But most of them have or are dropping into development crisis since 1990s.It is becoming the country-wide focal point for the sustainable development of Chinese resource-based cities.
Based on dating back to the history of Chinese resource-based cities' development, this paper not only analyses the evolution characteristics and laws of these cities systematically, from the changes of its quantity, category and spatial pattern, but also explores its forming reasons, and discusses the prospect of its development trends furtherly by selecting the existed resources-based cities in 1952,1984,1990 and 2004 in China. Research concludes that: 1)the number of China's resource-based cities has grown rapidly since the founding of the People's Republic and shows different transitions adherencing to the requirement of national economic development and social progress.A much sharper growth took place in 1949 and early 1960s. 2)the category of resource-based cities is becoming richer and the renewable resources, such as forest resources, tourism resources, are being paid much attention to.There is a marked increase in such kind of cities since the late 1990s, which accounted for 13.5 percent of all resource-based cities in 2004; 3) the spatial evolution pattern shows the characteristics of "concentrating on central areas, swinging between east and west areas". It's a comprehensive influence result of resources distribution, economic development, social progress, the urbanization process and national macroscopic policies.
Research has shown that China's resource-based cities will present new features in the future as follows: 1) the total number will decrease gradually, but the categories will be more diverse; 2) there will be more resource processing cities, which distribute along the coasts and the country's borders; 3) the distribution centre of resource-based cities will continue to shift to the west areas at a narrow range as far as the spatial patterns is concerned; 4)the sustainable development of the resource-exhausted cities will be a focus point in the future.
This study on the evolutionary characteristics and its development trends of China's resource-based cities not only provides the scientific directions and references for the restructuring and sustainable development of the resource-based cities, but also promotes national region sustainable development and urbanization.
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Received: 11 April 2007
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2008, Vol. 23 
