Factors Aggregating Ability and the Regional Differences among China’s Urban Agglomerations

Continuous aggregation of socioeconomic factors is the key issue of sustainable development in urban agglomerations. To date, more attention has been paid to single urban agglomeration than to multiple agglomerations. In this paper, China’s 19 urban agglomerations were selected as the case study and their spatial differences in factors aggregating ability were portrayed comparatively. Firstly, the spatial pattern of urban factors aggregating ability is relatively well distributed in all China’s cases, most noticeably in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration, closely followed by the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and the Pearl River Delta urban agglomerations. However, more significant differences on factors aggregating ability are noticeably seen between cities than among urban agglomerations. Meanwhile, the rank-size structure distribution of factors aggregating ability in China’s 19 cases is in line with the Zipf’s law of their urban systems, and divided into three types: Optimized, balanced, and discrete. Furthermore, the urban factors aggregation ability in one urban agglomeration is roughly negatively correlated with its primacy ratio of factors aggregating ability distribution. Lastly, urban agglomerations with higher average values of factors aggregating ability are concentrated on the three major urban agglomerations: The Yangtze River Delta, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and the Pearl River Delta. Otherwise, high-high clusters in the three urban agglomerations are distinctly observed as well.