关键词: 城市舒适性, 指标体系, 空间格局, 人口迁移, 人才迁入, 中国

Abstract:

Theories on sustainable urban development keep changing with socioeconomic changes. In recent years, urban amenity has been increasingly regarded as a new urban development approach and received wide attention in West, while only few studies have been conducted in this field in China. Taking reference from existing researches in West, this article aims at filling this gap by building a customized conceptual framework based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs to fit Chinese urban development situation and help the country to improve its urban competitiveness by adopting urban amenity as a new strategy in the context of new urbanization pursuit. Based on a theoretical framework and a comprehensive index system, the article carefully evaluates the urban amenity of major cities in China, and analyzes the correlation between urban amenity and net migration as well as talents migration. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) For the four sub-categories of urban amenity, the health environment in southern cities is better than that in northern ones, and cities with high level of self-realization environment are mainly with good economic base. Little surprisingly, the recreation environment level of central China is the lowest among the three regions in the country. And the spatial layout of social atmosphere is similar with that of self-realization environment, indicating that they might have a reciprocal causation relationship; (2) The level of overall urban amenity decreases from eastern coastal region to western inland region, and cities in the highest two levels are mainly located along eastern coastal China, including Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Xiamen and Haikou. The overall urban amenity performance of Wuhan and Xi'an are the highest in central and western China respectively; (3) While there is a strong correlation between urban amenity and in-migration in general, the correlation between urban amenity and talent in-migration is stronger. Based on analyses and the findings, this article puts forward two policy implications: (I) The excessive concentration of population in big cities in China is largely the consequence of high concentration of urban amenities in these cities, therefore only through relocation and construction of high level public services in medium- and small-sized cities along with their industrial restructuring could it alleviate the overcrowding in those megacities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen; (II) Given urban amenity is critic for attracting talent, medium and small sized cities should pay more attention to consistently improving their urban amenity facilities and management, which will help them to enhance their innovation capacity and overall competitiveness in gaining high share of development in China's recent process of economic transformation from traditional industrial to innovative and knowledge-oriented economy.

Key words: urban amenity, conceptual framework, spatial layout, talent, in-migration, China