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MEASURING SHRINKING CITIES AND INFLUENTIAL FACTORS IN URBAN CHINA: PERSPECTIVE OF POPULATION AND ECONOMY |
LIN Xiong-bin1,2, YANG Jia-wen1, ZHANG Xian-chun3, CHAO Heng2 |
1. School of Urban Planning and Design, Peking University, Shenzhen 518055, China;
2. College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;
3. Faculty of Architecture, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China |
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Abstract For the past two centuries, urbanization worldwide has progressed at a rapid pace, but urban growth and spatial development are usually distributed unevenly due to the influential factors including population, economic activities, physical environment and institutional-dependence. Recently, several countries or cities have experienced significant declines both in population and economic performance in the past decades. Even in growing city-regions, considerable decline would regularly occur. Under this context, the term-shrinking cities-mainly refers to cities or urban regions that experienced a dramatic loss in population, has been gradually discovered. For continuous urbanizing China, have some Chinese cities already experienced significant decline after more than twenty years' rapid economic growth? And if so, what are the potential influential factors, and to what extend these factors dominate cities' shrinking? These important questions related to urban sustainable development however still remain to be carefully examined, particularly the National New-type Urbanization should be considered. In order to measure the potential shrinkage phenomenon in urban China, in this paper, we first collect data on population, labor, economic, city expansion and fiscal conditions of 286 prefecture-level city from 2009 to 2013, and then use some regression models to explain the influential factors after measuring the potential shrinking cities based on comprehensive evaluation index. Finally, it gives certain potential implications to cope with shrinking cities both from the perspective of spatial planning and developmental policies.
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Received: 10 November 2015
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