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| APPLICATION OF THE POPULATION SIZE HIERARCHY MODEL——A Case of the Urban Group of Pearl River Delta |
| YE Yu-yao1,2, ZHANG Hong-ou2 |
1. School of Geography and Planning, SUN YAT-SEN University, Guangzhou 510275, China;
2. Guangzhou Institute of Geography, Guangzhou 510070, China |
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Abstract The quantitative research on the population size hierarchy is a basic work of the city planning. It's significant for the population forecast and the urban system planning. Using the Law of Primate City, the Rank-Size Rule and the Gennich coefficient model, the paper analyzes the population size hierarchy and its evolution character of the Urban Group of Pearl River Delta, so as to resolve some of the puzzles of our research on the population size hierarchy during the study and affording the city planning a measure for reference.
The study shows that the difference of the population size among the cites of the Pearl River Delta has been shortened during the recent 20 years. The increase of the population in the media and small towns is faster than that of the big cities,which shows the current of dispersion. For the rationality of the population size hierarchy, the population of big cities in the Pearl River Delta still has place for increasing.The comparative analysis of population getting from the fifth national census between that from the traditional population statistic shows that the floating population has a remarkable influence on the population size hierarchy of the Pearl River Delta and it's more reasonable to use the fifth national census to analyze the population size hierarchy. The floating population of the Pearl River Delta is more concentrative than the registered population. Due to the strict control policy of Guangzhou, the floating population mostly swarms into the other cities, such as Shenzhen, Foshan, Dongguan. As a result, the population size of the aforementioned cities increase faster than that of Guangzhou.
The study also shows that the Law of Primate City, the Rank-Size Rule and the Gennich coefficient model can fully disclose the character of the population size hierarchy of the Pearl River Delta. And as a constant curvefitting model, the Gennich coefficient model, makes up the deficiency of the regression curvefitting of the Rank-Size Rule perfectly and provides a new measure for evaluation of the rationality of the city size. And the latest is the key point to decide the results of the analysis.Up to now, the authors still haven't set up a suit of index of the city size in China durable and comparable with other countries. However, using the traditional population statistics in the trend analysis and the fifth national census in the static compare has initially solved the puzzles. But the final solution for the problem is to set up a new scientific index for the city size.
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Received: 30 January 2007
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2008, Vol. 23 
