Abstract
By 2030, 20 percent of the world's urban population will be Chinese, and the vast majority of those 20 percent will live in China's 19 metropolitan area. The spatial development pattern of China's metropolitan area will greatly affect the future of mankind. At present, except for the Yangtze river delta and Pearl river delta metropolitan area, most of the Chinese metropolitan areas are not spontaneously formed by industrial cooperation. On the contrary, administrative orders and policies greatly influence the way they are formed and operated. These top-down initiatives have been underwhelming in recent years, since China's massive construction of metropolitan areas began in 2007. It has become a common phenomenon that central cities have weak radiation ability to sub-cities due to small industrial linkage, and little regional integration and cooperation. "One-city Dominant" has become a typical feature of such single-central metropolitan areas. Take Wuhan metropolitan area as an example, through the recently five-years’ economic performance and development trend of all cities within, based on the analysis of space flow between central city and sub-cities, as well as scale of investment from central city to sub-cities, and other factors such as integration of infrastructure construction, to reveal the positive and negative effects of "strong index” for overall economic development of the metropolitan area. At the same time, through horizontal comparison with central cities of the same type of single-central metropolitan area such as Chengdu, Changsha, Zhengzhou and Nanning, to further analyze the impact of “strong index” on the economic development of metropolitan area. Then, the reasonable range and controllable approach of "strong index" are predicted, and the feasible model of non-equilibrium of metropolitan economic development will be discussed.
