Research progress and scientific issues in the field of urbanization

In 2014, the National New Urbanization Planning was issued, which indicates that China's urbanization has entered into a transition period from quantity growth to quality improvement. New urbanization will be an important work for the future China in quite a long period of time, which provides a significant opportunity for urbanization field research. This paper gives a general review on the domestic and foreign research progress in time.Internationally, the basic theory and theoretical system of urbanization have come into being.They have been enriched gradually with the deepening of the research. The research field has been expanded. The research methods have been improved. As for China's urbanization research, it developed fast despite a late start, and has made remarkable achievements in many fields, such as the scientific cognition and thoughts of a reasonable urbanization process with Chinese characteristics. In the future, five front scientific issues and their sub- issues in urbanization research have been put forward, such as the interdisciplinary features of urbanization and the establishment of urbanization discipline; the concept, principle, and method of the construction of urbanization basic theoretical system; the regional characteristics of urbanization and relationships between urban and rural integration; the developing model and spatial pattern research of sustainable development; the integration research and simulation platform of urbanization system based on the big data.