Abstract
As an important carrier of urbanization in China, the Yangtze River Delta region includes the spatial category of "three provinces and one city". There are not only super large and mega cities that absorb population, but also major labor outflow areas such as northern Anhui. As one of the most perfect urban agglomerations in China, the Yangtze River Delta has put forward the vision of integrated development in the past two regional planning of urban agglomerations. In the aspect of urbanization, it has put forward the goal of reaching 70% by 2025. In fact, the urbanization rate of the Yangtze River Delta has reached 70.85% by 2020, and there is still a significant gap between provinces and cities. It can be seen that a deep understanding of the performance and pattern evolution of regional urbanization development will help to grasp the essence of the new urbanization development under the people-centered concept, and then guide the future regional urbanization development and related policy design. In fact, the existing urbanization research has shifted the focus from the quantity of urbanization to the quality of urbanization, but it is easy to ignore the discussion on the utilization efficiency of production factors in the process of urbanization development. This study takes the Yangtze River Delta as an example, constructs the urbanization quality evaluation index system, and uses DEA model to explore the urbanization efficiency of cities in the Yangtze River Delta from 2010 to 2018. It interprets the urbanization development performance from the two dimensions of quality and efficiency, and then discusses the evolution characteristics of its spatial pattern, which will help to understand the evolution law of urbanization development in the Yangtze River Delta, It also provides enlightenment for the new urbanization process in the Yangtze River Delta and other cities in the world. The results show that: the urbanization quality of cities in the Yangtze River Delta is on the rise, but there are differences in the urbanization process of each dimension; At the same time, the differences of urbanization development efficiency among cities continue to decrease, and the scale efficiency of areas with low urbanization quality is prominent, while areas with high urbanization quality need to pay attention to tap the potential of technological progress and institutional innovation. On the whole, the urbanization development performance of the Yangtze River Delta shows a spatial agglomeration trend of low in the northwest and high in the southeast. High performance urbanization cities have absolute attraction to the resources, funds, talents and other elements of low performance cities. With the acceleration of integration into the Yangtze River Delta, the development elements of low performance cities are siphoned more obviously by high performance cities, In the long run, regional polarization will continue to intensify.
