Non-coordination in China’s urbanization: Assessment and affecting factors

TLDR

Urbanization involves population, economic, and spatial dimensions, and coordination among them is essential for sustainable development, a concern heightened by China’s rapid city growth and limited land. The study aims to systematically assess coordinated urbanization in China, identify non‑coordination levels from 2000‑2008, and propose policy measures for sustainable development. The authors constructed a quantitative method to evaluate urbanization coordination and applied it to empirical data from China between 2000 and 2008. The analysis shows that China’s overall urbanization coordination declined during 2000‑2008 due to divergent trajectories of population, economic, and spatial urbanization, and identifies performance assessment, household registration, and land expropriation systems as key influencing factors.

Abstract

Urbanization is a comprehensive concept, a trinity process that is based on the interactions and mutual influences among the population urbanization, economic urbanization and space urbanization, in which, people are the central and leading players in this process, while economic activities serve as the driving force and space is the carrier—the physical or material setting as well as the product. So the coordination among these processes is crucial for a country or region's sustainable development. China is experiencing rapid growth of cities and a surge in urban population, with the basic national condition of many people and little land, which calls for a systematic study of the issue of coordinated urbanization from theoretical, methodological and practical perspectives. Based on the concept of urbanization and non-coordination of urbanization, this article built a quantitative method to identify and evaluate the urbanization and non-coordination of urbanization, and made an empirical analysis in China between 2000 and 2008. The results show that the non-coordination overall level of China's urbanization declined during the study period, because population urbanization, economic urbanization, and space urbanization exhibited different trajectories of change. This study also reveals that performance assessment system, household registration system, and urban land expropriation system, etc., are the main affecting factors. At the end, we put forward some suggestions to achieve sustainable development of China's urbanization from the aspects of improving the local government's objective function, implementing the urban planning system, enforcing public participation aspects and so on.