| Abstract: | This paper makes a detailed analysis of the vanous drawbacks of the continued use of adwhnistrative area in dividing urban and rural areas in spite of the serious discrepancies between urban admnistrative boundaries and the "real" urban space in China. The autiors believe that to solve this problem, it is essential to establish the concept of physical urban area with both adaptability to Chinese situation and intemational comparability and use it as the basis of urban-rural division and statistics. It is proposed that physical urban area should be defined in terms of prescribed minimum population scale, dngee of nonaghculturalization and population density.Based on extensive substantive research and a classifiotion of the space figurations of Chinese cities and towns, a new scheme to classify physical urban areas is proposed. |
