Urban forms reflect spatial structures of cities, which have been consciously and dramatically changing in China. Fast urbanisation may lead to similar urban forms due to similar habits and strategies of city planning. However, whether urban forms in China are identical or significantly different has not been empirically investigated. In this paper, urban forms are investigated based on two spatial units: city and block. The boundaries of natural cities in terms of the density of human settlements and activities are delineated with the concept of ‘redefined city’ using points of interests (POIs), and blocks are determined by road networks. Urban forms are characterised by city-block two-level spatial morphologies. Further, redefined cities are classified into four hierarchies to examine the effects of different city development stages on urban forms. The spatial morphology is explained by urbanisation variables to understand the effects. Results show that the urban forms are spatially clustered from the perspective of city-block two-level morphologies. Urban forms tend to be similar within the same hierarchies, but significantly varied among different hierarchies, which is closely related to the development stages. Additionally, the spatial dimensional indicators of urbanisation could explain 41% of the spatial morphology of redefined cities.
Scientifically identifying cities in the spatial dimension is a basis for objectively understanding urbanization, improving urban and rural statistics and formulating urban and rural planning strategies. In this article, using communities as basic administrative units and the data of urban built-up areas, a straightforward method to identify physical urban area has been established. We used this method to identity the physical urban area in Chinese whole territory and redefined Chinese city system. According to our studies, there are total 1,227 cities in China from the perspective of physical urban area covering 60,535km2 and this city amount is 86.2% higher than the amount of Chinese administrative cities which is 659. There are 126 Chinese administrative cities did not contain any cities from the physical urban area perspective, including 19 prefecture level cities, such as Sanming, Nanping, Chongzuo, Lincang, Yan’an, Yulin, Ya’an, Karamay, Donghai and 107 county level cities, such as Sansha and Alar, Dunhuang, Tongren, Wugang, Zhangshu, Jianyang and Wuyishan. There are 10 administrative cites contain at least 5 cities from the physical urban area perspective, which can be suggested to be divided into several smaller cities for management. They are Chongqing (16 cities), Beijing (12 cities), Suzhou (9 cities), Changzhou (7 cities), Shanghai (7 cities), Tianjin(6 cities), Wuhan (6 cities), Zaozhuang (6 cities), Shantou (6cities) and Foshan (6 cities). Our study is expected to provide supports for urban and rural planning and construction department and ministry of civil affairs to adjust urban administrative boundaries.
Modern Chinese cities are defined from the administrative view and classified into several administrative categories, which makes it inconsistent between Chinese cities and their counterparts in western countries. Without easy access to fine-scale data, researchers have to rely heavily on statistical and aggregated indicators available in officially released yearbooks, to understand Chinese city system. Not to mention the data quality of yearbooks, it is problematic that a large number of towns or downtown areas of counties are not addressed in yearbooks. To address this issue, as a following study of xxxx et al. (2016), we have redefined the Chinese city system, using percolation theory in the light of newly emerging big/open data. In this paper, we propose our alternative definition of a city with road/street junctions, and present the methodology for extracting city system for the whole country with national wide road junctions. A city is defined as “a spatial cluster with a minimum of 100 road/street junctions within a 300 m distance threshold”. Totally we identify 4,629 redefined cities with a total urban area of 64,144 km2 for the whole China. We observe total city number increases from 2,273 in 2009 to 4,629 in 2014. We find that expanded urban area during 2009 and 2014, comparing with urban areas in 2009 are associated with 73.3% road junction density, 25.3% POI density and 5.5% online comment density. In addition, we benchmark our results with the conventional Chinese city system by using yearbooks.
The last several decades have witnessed a rapid yet uneven urban expansion in developing countries. The existing studies rely heavily on official statistical yearbooks and remote sensing images. However, the former data sources have been criticized due to its non-objectivity and low quality, while the latter is labor and cost consuming in most cases. Recent efforts made by fractal analyses provide alternatives to scrutinize the corresponding “natural urban area”. In our proposed framework, the dynamics of internal urban contexts is reflected in a quasi-real-time manner using emerging new data and the expansion is a fractal concept instead of an absolute one based on the conventional Euclidean method. We then evaluate the magnitude and pattern of natural cities and their expansion in size and space. It turns out that the spatial expansion rate of official cities (OCs) in our study area China has been largely underestimated when compared with the results of natural cities (NCs). The perspective of NCs also provides a novel way to understanding the quality of uneven urban expansion. We detail our analysis for the 23 urban agglomerations in China, especially paying more attention to the three most dominating urban agglomerations of China: Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and Pearl River Delta (PRD). The findings from the OC method are not consistent with the NC method. The distinctions may arise from the definition of a city, and the bottom-up NC method contributes to our comprehensive understanding of uneven urban expansion.