建立中国城市的实体地域概念

本文总结了我国在城市的行政地域与景观地域严重背离的情况下，继续使用行政地域区分城乡的种种弊端，认为解决这一问题于关键在于建立适合中国特点又具有国际可比性的城市实体地域概念，以此作为城乡划分及统计的地域基础，文章提出以下限人口规模、非农化水平和人口密度三个指标定义城市实体地域，并在大量实证研究的基础上，通过对中国城市空间形态的分类，提出了一套完整的划分实体地域的方法和工作程序。

TOWARD ESTABLISHING THE CONCEPT OF PHYSICAL URBAN AREA IN CHINA

It is generally agreed that human settlements are classified either as urban places or as rural places,In urban studies,one has to deal with the relerant materials in the right way so as to reflect the reality of urban area.Urban areas may be conceived as administrative, functional and physical entities. This paper make a detailed analysis on the various drawbacks of the continued use of adiministrative area in the division of urban and rural area in spite of the serious discrepancies between urban administrative boundaries and the real' urban space in China, Almost the administrative area of all cities and towns are much larger than the urban built-up area. As a result, vast rural areas and large agricultural population were included in the urban count. Here lies the principal difference with western countries. Obviously, it is difficult if not impossible for us to solve the contradiction by reducing the adiministrative area of a city or town. The authors believe that to solve this problem, it is essential to establish the concept of physical urban area with both adaptability to Chinese conditions and international comparability and make it the basis of urban-rural division and statistics.It is proposed that physical urban area in China can be delimitated in terms of three criteria,prescribed minimum population scale, degree of nonagricuturalization and population density, and the names of citied area or townized area can be given as the counterpart of urbanized area in the United States.The administrative area of a city or town in China consists of two parts: urban district and suburban area. The combination of the two parts is very conplex. For this reason, the key to put our scheme into effect is the classification of types according to the different relations between the two parts.Based on extensive research, the authors find that three factors bring about twelve types. AIa and AIb of them are the most basic types,All these types have their own quantitative standards.After understanding these types, the delineation of the physical urban areas become fairly easy according to the flow diagram(Fig.1).Eleven samples, except one type which is not find,are cited in this paper (Fig.2).