A Comprehensive Quantitative Evaluation of New Sustainable Urbanization Level in 20 Chinese Urban Agglomerations

Abstract

Abstract:On 16 March 2014, the State Council of China launched its first urbanization planning initiative dubbed "National New Urbanization Planning (2014-2020)" (NNUP). NNUP put forward 20 urban agglomerations and a sustainable development approach aiming to transform traditional Chinese urbanization to sustainable new urbanization. This study quantitatively evaluates the level of sustainability of the present new urbanization process in 20 Chinese urban agglomerations and provides some positive suggestions for the achievement of sustainable new urbanization. A three-level index system which is based on six fundamental elements in a city and a Full Permutation Polygon Synthetic Indicator evaluation method are adopted. The results show that China is undergoing a new urbanization process with a low level of sustainability and there are many problems remaining from traditional urbanization processes. There exists a polarized phenomenon in the urbanization of 20 urban agglomerations. Based on their own development patterns, the 20 urban agglomerations can be divided into seven categories. Every category has its own development characteristics. The analyses also show that waste of water resources, abuse of land resources, and air pollution are three big problems that are closely linked to traditional Chinese urbanization processes. To achieve sustainable new urbanization in China, four relevant suggestions and comments have been provided.

Dynamic Coupling Analysis of Urbanization and Water Resource Utilization Systems in China

“…This rate started to decline after 2010. The pattern of the water utilization index can be approximated with a nonlinear fitting process as shown in Equation (10). We find that the cubic function has the best fit as shown in Equation (16) and Figure 4.…”

“…The summary statistic for the regression is as follow: R 2 = 0.891, F value = 24.439, the t statistics for the coefficients are 5.666, −2.181, −3.585, and 3.302, respectively; all are significant at the 5% level. The pattern of the water utilization index can be approximated with a nonlinear fitting process as shown in Equation (10). We find that the cubic function has the best fit as shown in Equation (16) and Figure 4.…”

“…Based on Equation (10) and the values of a t , b t , and c t , the forecast equation can be written as:…”

“…Studies on this topic focus mainly on two aspects: first, how do water resources support and accelerate the urbanization process. Abundant water resources not only provide for the daily needs of city-dwellers, water is also an important input for various industrial and tertiary activities [10,11]. Furthermore, abundant water resources support improved ecological, environmental, and climatological factors that are attractive to business firms and talented workers.…”

Is Spatial Resolution Critical in Urbanization Velocity Analysis? Investigations in the Pearl River Delta

“…However, the understanding of urbanization is primarily based on population figures obtained from the United Nations; these statistics do not include any information on the population spatial distributions, or evolution metrics of built-up areas within urban environments [2][3][4].…”