Abstract: In recent years,the Chinese government has promoted the concept of New-type Urbanization,which stresses urban sustainability and focuses primarily on urbanization quality instead of urbanization quantity.However,how to define and measure urbanization quality has not been authoritatively released by the Chinese government.Therefore,this paper constructed an integrated index system to measure urbanization quality based on its connotation,and ascertained the grading standards for each specific indicator and their integrated indexes according to domestic and overseas experiences.Using the statistical data of 51 prefecture level regions in Northwest China during the time period from 2000 to 2014 and a multi-objective membership function and an AHP model reformed by entropy technology,the spatiotemporal variation of urbanization quality was analyzed in detail.The results show as follows: (1) Compared with the advanced standards in China and abroad,the integrated indexes of urbanization quality of Northwest China were between 0.4 and 0.5,belonging to the medium level all the time.However,it has a trend to increase slowly on the whole.It indicates that Northwest China has great potential to improve the urbanization quality,and the government should pay more attention to make policies on improving the urbanization quality of Northwest China in the future.(2) Among the secondary indexes of urbanization quality,the urban eco-environmental quality was the largest.It belonged to higher quality all along but had a trend of deterioration in recent years.The urban social development quality was the second largest.It was improved from lower to medium and higher quality.The urban economic development quality was the third largest.It belonged to the transitional type between lower and medium quality.The urban-rural and regional integration quality was the smallest.It belonged to medium or lower quality during the period.However,it had a slow increasing trend in recent years.Therefore,Northwest China should deal with the coordinated development at the four aspects of urbanization quality.(3) From a spatial point of view,prefecture level regions with medium urbanization quality were widely distributed,while prefecture level regions with lower and higher urbanization quality were sporadically distributed.The spatiotemporal distributions of the four secondary indexes of urbanization quality also showed strong regularities.However,they had no significant relevance to the spatiotemporal distribution of population urbanization rate.It indicates that Northwest China should promote the coordinated development of urbanization quality and quantity according to local conditions when carrying out the New-type Urbanization Strategy.This paper might help scientifically understand the spatiotemporal features of the urbanization quality in Northwest China,and also provides an effective index system about the urbanization quality for similar regions.

Key words: urbanization quality, integrated assessment, spatiotemporal evolution, northwest China