COMPREHENSIVE MEASUREMENT AND SPATIAL PATTERN OF URBANIZATION LEVEL OF CHINA'S CITIES

The urbanization in the new century is not just the issue of the shift of rural population to urban, and the changes of economic structure and spatial use also have become the important aspects that have profound impact on the regional spatial patterns of urbanization. Base on definition of urbanization, this paper selects the three most fundamental indicators which involve population urbanization rate, economy urbanization rate and space urbanization rate, to form a synthesis index to measure the comprehensive urbanization levels of China’s cities in 2007. With arcgis tools, further analyses focus on the spatial pattern of urbanization and its changes. The result shows that the comprehensive urbanization level of China’s cities is decreasing from northeast to southwest. The cities with higher level of comprehensive urbanization are close to each other in space, forming several high-value concentrated areas such as Harbin-Daqing-Changchun area, central and southern Liaoning area, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, Yangtze River Delta area, Pearl River Delta area, Jianghan area and Shandong Peninsula. On this basis, according to the combinations of development level of three urbanization components, the total cities can be classified into 3 groups which are the balanced development type, comparatively balanced development type and unbalanced development type and then 9 subgroups. From the perspective of urbanization systems coordination, the main problems of the cities of each type were revealed and the main directions of urbanization development in the future were proposed.