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干旱区地理 ›› 2018, Vol. 41 ›› Issue (3): 661-667.

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City-size distribution and allometric growth in Xinjiang based on fractal theory

MA Yu-xiang, ZHANG Jun-min, WANG Li-hong   

  1. Department of Geography, College of Science, Shihezi University, Shihezi 832000, Xinjiang, China
  • Received:2018-01-10 Revised:2018-04-02 Online:2018-05-25

Abstract: The composition of urban system is a reflection of the combining and interactive relationship between cities on various elements such as inter-city politics, economy, society, culture, production, natural condition and building space, which establishes the basis for further development of urbanization and regional economy and society. With the acceleration of urbanization, the evolution of urban system becomes more complicated. In order to make clear the evolution rules for the urban system in Xinjiang, China and to formulate guiding strategies for urban development,this study adopts the fractal theory, including the rank-size rule, the population-area allometric growth, to analyze the evolution of the cities' scales and structures and the rule of allometric growth, based on data about non-agricultural population and urban area of the cities in Xinjiang from 2005 to 2014. The results indicated that the urban system of Xinjiang showed a strong primary city distribution and a strong cohesiveness of the cities. In the whole Xinjiang region, Zipf index changes are divided into two stages:Zipf index was changed slightly from 2005 to 2007 and the index was risen slowly from 2008 to 2014, gradually getting closer to the ideal index value of 1. For cities of Xinjiang, the concentration of city-size distribution is higher than the decentralization, the cities of middle ranks are being developed rapidly, and the city-size distribution tends to be more and more reasonable. During the periods from 2005 to 2007 and from 2011 to 2014 respectively, urban population growth was faster than the spatial expansion and thus the population-area allometric growth showed a negative feature. While from 2008 to 2010, the rate of spatial expansion is faster than that of the population growth and the population-area allometric growth showed a positive feature. The relationship between urban population and area showed the sign of degradation on the whole and the urban hierarchical structure was relatively loose in Xinjiang.

Key words: urban system, fractal, allometric growth, Xinjiang

CLC Number: 

  • F290