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| NEW BACKGROUNDS AND NEW TRENDS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF METROPOLITAN AREAS AND THEIR RESPONSES IN PLANNING |
| XUE Jun-fei |
| School of Geographic and Oceanographic Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China |
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Abstract With one or several central cities as its cire, metropolitan area is a spatial agglomeration of cities and towns, attracting the peripheral cities and regions through developed transportation relations. With the rapid suburbanization since twentieth century, the metropolitan areas have grown up in succession all over the world. Since 1920s, each of the great metropolitan areas has carried through the planning successively. Most of these metropolitan area plans were effective. They not only ensured the benign development of metropolitan areas but also greatly promoted the national and regional development. However, by the time of late twentieth century, with the development of the economic globalization, the great changes have taken place in the development backgrounds of metropolitan areas. In the recent years, the competition between cities becomes drastic increasingly, the development of cities shows more and more regional characters and the metropolis becomes the mainstream of the development of cities and urbanization all over the world. Under these new backgrounds, the development of metropolitan areas appears, intensifies and emerges a new form; the spatial diffusion becomes more fargoing and the built areas trend to be continuous; and the urban region tends to be amalgamative and develops obviously across the borderlines. In order to respond these new situations to achieve better and more rapid development, many great metropolitan areas in the world such as New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Berlin and the like have adjusted their conceptions, objectives, and emphases in planning one after another, adopted positive measures to promote the spatial, industrial, and infrastructural development of metropolitan areas, and improved the governance for the metropolitan areas. The planners take the city and region as a whole and survey the problems of metropolitan areas in the global development circumstance through the process of planning. The main contents of planning always apply themselves to form the polycentric spatial structure of metropolitan area, promote the diffusion and transfer of industries in the metropolitan area, integrate the transportation system of metropolitan area to be netlike, and establish a institution such as metropolitan government to manage the preparation and implementation of planning of metropolitan area, etc. Compared with the past planning of metropolitan areas, these new planning have several aspects of the advantages as follows: the eyeshot of planning is more widen, the ideas and contents of planning are more suitable to the occasion, and the effect of planning implementation is better. Thus the new metropolitan planning effectively defuses the contradictions in development faced by the cities and regions in the new era. These good experiences should be introduced to metropolitan areas of China, in order to upgrade the planning and construction level in domestic metropolitan areas.
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Received: 13 March 2007
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2008, Vol. 23 
