Abstract: The comprehensive carrying capacity of cities is the embodiment for evaluating whether a city has the ability of comprehensive development,and increasing the comprehensive carrying capacity has important practical significance to promote the new urbanization process. As a special economic,social,resource and environment complex system with the characteristics of dissipative structure,the city has a continuous exchange of material energy with the outside world in the process of its formation and development. In this process,the city system not only enjoys economic,social and resource and environmental factors on the supporting role of its development, but also faces pressure from different factors,at the same time,as the main body of the city,people have the ability to take the initiative to make a positive response,through the role of regulation to strengthen the support for different elements and to avoid the pressure of the outside world. Therefore,the comprehensive carrying capacity of the city can be regarded as the coupling function of the support,the pressure and the control force produced by different factors. The evaluation index system and function model are established from three aspects: the pressure,the supporting force and the control force of the city,making a scientific evaluation of the comprehensive carrying capacity of cities at prefectural level and above in China 2015,and exploring the spatial distribution characteristics by using the exploratory spatial data analysis method. Through the further study,we can drawing the following conclusion: Overall,the comprehensive carrying capacity level at prefecture level and above in China is low,and there is a big difference of the comprehensive carrying capacity between different cities at prefecture level and above in China,presenting a tendency of decrease from east coast to the west inland on the whole. Through the further analysis of spatial distribution characteristics,finding cities at prefecture level and above in space showing a strong positive correlation,the high-high aggregation,low-low aggregation effect is significant. This is also a response to the external driving effect of urban development. The result of the cold hot spot diagram made a further explanation in response to the above phenomenon. H-H type cities are mainly distributed in the hot zone,H-L city type cities mainly distribute in the western regions and the provincial capital cities, L-H type city has only one city,Heyuan City,L-L type cities concentrated in cold area. From local space correlation point of view,presenting a spatial pattern of hot spots transformed into cold spots from east to west,reflecting the city from the eastern coastal areas to the inland areas had more and more restrictions that from natural conditions, geographical advantages,policy and technology and other aspects. The main innovations of this paper are listed as follows:(1)The 289 cities at prefecture level and above as the research object,we had a large sample size,and the results have a strong guiding value.(2)In the establishment of the index system,the five of the city's development theory of innovation,coordination,green,open and sharing are considered.(3)Analyzing the spatial pattern of comprehensive carrying capacity in-depth,and exploring the correlation of urban comprehensive carrying capacity between different cities,that we can easy to reveal the city development of the external driving force. Of course,there are some deficiencies in this paper because of the lack of analysis on the time dimension; we can not clear the spatial evolution of urban comprehensive carrying capacity from the dynamic point of view. Besides,the driving mechanism of urban comprehensive carrying capacity and its spatial pattern need a further research based on qualitative and quantitative methods.

Key words: new urbanization, cities at prefecture level and above, urban comprehensive carrying capacity, spatial pattern, China