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| EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THE MECHANISMS OF URBAN COOPERATION IN CHINA |
| MIAO Chang-hong1, ZHANG Jian-wei2 |
1. Center for Yellow River Civilisation and Sustainable Development & College of Environment and Planning, Henan University, Kaifeng 475001, China;
2. Department of Urban and Regional Economy, East China Normal Uniersity, Shanghai 200062, China |
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Abstract In response to the challenges from the speeding-up globalization and the furious regional competition, more and more cities search to cooperate and to build partnerships each other by the ways such as urban agglomeration, urban cohesion, city-region and urban integration. In this paper, by using the evolutionery thinking based on evolutionary economics and evolutionary economic geography, we develop an evolutionary framework to analyze urban cooperation in China and investigate its nature, content, machnism and key factors. With reference to the practice of Chinese urban cooperation, we survey the patterns of Chinese inter-city cooperation which can be categorized into four types: information communication, subject association, economic integration and institutional integration. We find that the process of urban cooperation is a complex system; the basic nature and aim of inter-city cooperation is to pursue urban agglomeration economy which includes sharing, matching and learning effects exiting not only in a single city, but also in city-region, urban cluster and urban system at different spatial scale and level. In the first two phases of information communication and subject association, the geographical and raltional proximities based on spatial distance and social capital or relational asset take the key roles; but in the last two phases of economic integation and institutional integration, urban cooperation depends more and more on the institutional proximity based on the cultural identity, economic agreement and policy Act. The Chinese urban cooperation is mainly drived by the market forces and government powers which come from the processes of decentralization, marketization and; globalization; the evolutionary theory is a potential and powerful approach to research the evolutionary process of urban agglomeration and the patterns of urban cooperation which takes place in Chinese context of transitional economy and the practice of regional development.
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Received: 01 September 2011
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2012, Vol. 27 
