Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States of America.
Ecology and Evolution, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2019 Sep 3;14(9):e0221017. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0221017. eCollection 2019.
Nowhere has the scale and scope of urbanization been larger than in China over the last few decades. We analyze Chinese city development between the years 1996 and 2014 using data for the urbanized components of prefecture-level cities. We show that, despite much variability and fast economic and demographic change, China is undergoing transformations similar to the historical trajectory of other urban systems. We also show that the distinguishing signs of urban economies-superlinear scaling of agglomeration effects in economic productivity and economies of scale in land use-also characterize Chinese cities. We then analyze the structure of economic change in Chinese cities using a variety of metrics, characterizing employment, firms and households. Population size estimates remain a major challenge for Chinese cities, as official numbers are often reported based on the Hukou registration system. We use the information in the residuals to scaling relations for economic quantities to predict actual resident population and show that these estimates agree well with data for a subset of cities for which counts of total resident population exist. We conclude with a list of issues that must be better understood and measured to make sense of present urban development trajectories in China.
在过去几十年里，中国的城市化规模和范围前所未有。我们利用 1996 年至 2014 年地级市的城市化部分数据来分析中国城市发展。结果表明，尽管存在很大的可变性和快速的经济与人口变化，中国正在经历与其他城市系统类似的转型。我们还表明，城市经济的显著标志——经济生产力集聚效应的超线性扩展和土地利用的规模经济——也具有中国城市的特点。然后，我们使用各种指标分析中国城市的经济结构，描述就业、企业和家庭的情况。人口规模估计仍然是中国城市的主要挑战，因为官方数字通常是基于户籍登记系统报告的。我们利用经济数量的标度关系中的残差信息来预测实际居民人口，并表明这些估计与存在总居民人口计数的一部分城市的数据吻合较好。最后，我们列出了一些必须更好地理解和衡量的问题，以便了解中国当前的城市发展轨迹。
