Analysis of the characteristics and spatial differences of urbanization quality of cities at prefecture level and above in China

In the 1978~2007 period,the urbanization level in China rose from 17.92% to 44.99,and the urbanization construction has made great progress.With more and more problems related to urbanization emerging,the importance of urbanization quality has been emphasized and many papers have been published in this field. According to the connotation of urbanization quality,the paper constructs the appraisal index system of urbanization quality,including economic development,infrastructure,employment,citizen life,social development,environment,land use quality,innovation quality,and urban-rural gap.With the method of entropy,the urbanization quality of 286 cities at prefecture level and above is analyzed.The results show there are great gaps of urbanization quality between cities,and the urbanization quality is not high as a whole.There is no corresponding relation between urbanization quality and city size,and The bigger,the better is not a correct expression concerned with urbanization quality.It is considered that population urbanization level cannot reflect urbanization quality,and that population urbanization is not the ultimate goal.Those cities of higher urbanization quality still have many deficiencies,which needs to be remedied.The spatial differences of urbanization quality are significant,with the urbanization quality decreasing from the eastern coastal regions to central and western regions.The cities of higher urbanization quality are distributed in the form of agglomeration,which fits well the urban agglomerations in China.