Spatial Production and Governance of Urban Agglomeration in China 2000–2015: Yangtze River Delta as a Case

Chao Ye, Zhaojing Liu, Wenbo Cai, Ruishan Chen, Liangliang Liu and Yongli Cai
Additional contact information
Chao Ye: Faculty of Education & School of Geographic Sciences, Shanghai Municipal Institute for Lifelong Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory for Urban Ecological Process and Eco-restoration & Institute of Eco-Chongming, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
Zhaojing Liu: Faculty of Education & School of Geographic Sciences, Shanghai Municipal Institute for Lifelong Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory for Urban Ecological Process and Eco-restoration & Institute of Eco-Chongming, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
Wenbo Cai: School of Environmental Sciences, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, UK
Ruishan Chen: Faculty of Education & School of Geographic Sciences, Shanghai Municipal Institute for Lifelong Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory for Urban Ecological Process and Eco-restoration & Institute of Eco-Chongming, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
Liangliang Liu: School of Resource and Earth Science, Yunnan University, Kunming 650091, China
Yongli Cai: School of Ecological and Environmental Science, Shanghai Key Laboratory for Urban Ecological Process and Eco-restoration, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 5, 1-17

Abstract: Urban agglomeration plays an essential role in world urbanization. Urban agglomerations in developing countries like China, although have the same characteristics as the developed countries because of globalization, often show a more different and dynamic process. Urban agglomerations in China are generally dominated and planned as a mode of organizing and improving urbanization by the Chinese government; however, in different regions, urban agglomeration has different trajectories based on a different historical and geographical context. The paper applies a new social theory, production of space, into explaining the development and governance of urban agglomeration in China, which is effective and meaningful to help understand the developmental process of urban agglomeration and urbanization. The theory of spatial production focuses on the relation between society and space, in which ‘society’ has a broad meaning and can be divided into three factors or parts: power, capital, and class. This paper chooses YRD (the Yangtze River Delta) as a typical case and designs a simple index system to reflect the influences of these three factors on urban agglomeration. The governance of urban agglomeration will be indicated by national or regional policies analysis. According to such a synthesis method of index assessment, GIS (Geographic Information System), and policies analysis, we find Chinese urban agglomeration is a capital-intensive region, and the national policies tend to regard it as an intensive investment object. Planning and governance from top-down power have more influence than the market in the evolving process of urban agglomeration. There is a contradiction between spatial production and people-oriented urbanization, with the latter more important than the former, but China’s urbanization often emphasizes the former. It is high time to link the techniques and methods such as GIS to the social theories like the production of space in urban studies.

Keywords: urban agglomeration; spatial production; governance; social space; regional imbalance; Yangtze River Delta; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/5/1343/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/5/1343/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:5:p:1343-:d:210809

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().