From dispersed to clustered: New trend of spatial restructuring in China's metropolitan region of Yangtze River Delta

Rapid growth of metropolitan regions has become a key issue in relation to urban governance and planning in developing countries. The past decades have witnessed a dramatic spatial restructuring in metropolitan regions in China. Although many studies have been done, conclusions are yet to achieve consensus. Several main arguments still need to be discussed further: how to identify this spatial restructuring process; what is general trend of spatial restructuring; and how the spatial restructuring are affected by a variety of institutional and economic factors. This study aims to address these arguments by scrutinizing the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) of China as a case. We use a new data set, namely, nighttime light data derived from the Operational Linescan System of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, to explore the spatial restructuring of YRD from 1992 to 2012. Results found that urban growth in YRD has been dominated by a “dispersed” pattern before the 2000s due to local industrialization and political decentralization. However, after the 2000s, a new “clustered” trend evolved in YRD, and inequalities in regional development tend to increase. A few politically or economically (or both) advantaged cities became new growth centres, while other cities grew slowly. These advantaged cities mainly were mega cities and province capital cities. A growth of importance of domestic consumer market gave more economic opportunities to these advantaged cities which had a large population size and a better political capability to adapt new economic situation. In particular, they were enabled to have more powers to make locally privileged policies to attract investments and population in the current process of deeply market-oriented forms in China.