Spatial structure of city-and-town concentrated area in Henan Province

A survey was conducted among 997 city-and-towns selected from 127 counties or county-level cities in Henan province in 2004.Data collected include 4 attributes for each city-and-town,and 3 attributes for about 900 traffic lines and 12 attributes for 127 county-level units.The different attribute values of each city-and-town were converted into the unified index named city-and-town growth equivalent for the sake of simplicity.In the same way,the different length numbers of traffic lines and other indexes in a city-and-town were converted into the linkage intension index,and the development level of its matrix.And here,the other indexes includes passenger traffic,freight traffic,passenger-kilometers,freight ton-kilometers, business volume of telecommunications,number of local telephone subscribers at year-end,number of mobile telephones subscribers,capacity of long-distance call exchanges,number of subscribers of internet service.The paper separately discusses the centralized degree of city-and-town from the following three angles such as the growth of node,and the linkage of traffic network and traffic flows and volume of telecommunications and the level of regional development,and then classifies the study units in the spatial distribution by the corresponding scores.By employing GIS software,this paper divides the spatial structure based on the county unit data,and finds the following results:(1) the core region,including 13 county-level units such as Zhengzhou city,Gongyi city,Xinzheng city etc.;(2) the secondary core region,including 12 county-level units such as Dengfeng city,Zhongmou county,Xinxiang county etc.;(3) the latency core region,including 18 county-level units such as Kaifeng county,Qixian,county,Tongxu county etc.;and(4) the periphery region,including 14 county-level units mainly located to the south of Luoyang city,the south of Pingdingshan city and the north of Xinxiang city.Per capita GDP of the core and secondary core regions,is 2.04 times of the average value in Henan province,but population accounts for 12.22% of the provincial total population,and the GDP occupies 25.93%.In addition to the further development of city-and-town concentrated area in the Central Plains by means of perfecting the city-and-town systems,strengthening the linkages among cities and towns and improving their economic capacities synchronously,more attention should be paid to the improvement of the development level of less developed areas in the future.