An Integrated Perspective of the Spatial Pattern and Influence Domain of Cities: the Case of China

摘要

Studies on the relationship between cities in a region are carried out from two perspectives: verifying the agglomeration or interaction of cities of different sizes, and identifying central cities and their influence domains. But they both have limitations. The former is only used for descriptive analysis without considering the relationship among cities, while the latter is restricted by the preciseness of identification. Using the spatial autocorrelation analysis, this paper combines the two methods to investigate the regional and local influence of cities of different sizes from the influenced rather than influencing perspective, which also indicates the agglomeration and dispersion of different sized cities. The empirical study on China’s 637 cities with urban land sizes proves the integrated approach feasible and effective. Considering the effect of scales on interaction among cities and the hierarchy of urban service functions, we analyze the issue on regional and local scales with the inverse distance and inverse distance squared as the spatial weight matrix. Regardless the own size of investigated cities, as long as most cities are surrounded by large cities, in other words association types of city sizes are mainly HH or LH, it indicates that large cities with powerful regional or local influence are dominant in the region. Otherwise, the radiation effect of central cities is limited and agglomeration of small cities is the typical characteristic of regional urban system. Cities with the most significant regional influence agglomerate in the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta and the Beijing-Tianjin metropolitan area. Among the five metropolitan areas in Eastern China, super-cities are dominant in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and the Pearl River Delta without the following development of small and medium cities;the Yangtze River Delta and Central-Southern Liaoning are characterized by the collaborative development of different sized cities led by super-cities;cities in Shandong Peninsula cooperate with each other well without a distinguished leading city. The regional influence of central cities in central and western China is limited. There are relatively large numbers of cities in central China, whose local influence domains can completely cover the whole region. At the same time, the regional influence of some (joint) central cities may increase by leaps and bounds. However, the urban size hierarchy is dominated by small cities as lacking large cities in the vast west China. Because of the limited regional and local influence of central cities, many outlying small cities have no chance to share the radiation effect of central cities. Since the influence of a specific central city on non-central cities can’t be separated from that of other cities, this integrated approach of inspecting the influence domain of central cities through their influences accepted by others is not perfectly accurate. However, the method provides a new perspective for the study on city’s influence domain, which is to combine the regional influence of central cities with the spatial distribution of cities of different sizes through the interaction among them.