关键词: 空间联系, 自下而上, 城市腹地, 江苏省

Abstract:

With the development of computer technology and geographic information system (GIS), three significant transformation appears in measuring method of urban hinterland. Firstly, the method develops from the qualitative to the quantitative. Secondly, GIS is increasingly integrated with traditional methods. Thirdly, time-distance gradually replaces physical distance, while they have the commom thinking to classify the cities by their qualities. The urban hinterlands can be deviede to different categories, which is called "top-down" method in this article. Since the method focuses on the quality without considering distance as a factor, the results are not good enough in the area where the internal differentiation is significant. Therefore, the method named "bottom-up" is put forward here. And selecting Jiangsu Province as a case, the cities in it are divided to different levels and their hinterlands are measured in the years of 1990, 1996, 2002 and 2008 based on the 1:250 000 basic geographic data, the transportation network data and the statistic data of counties (cities). The division process involves: to obtain the scales of 65 cities by factor analysis, to get the time-distance between cities by the accessibility analysis, and to determine the levels of the urban and their hinterlands after merging them by grade through maximum spatial linkage. The result shows that: it is more accurate to use accessibility capacity than using the straight-line distance, since not only the comprehensive strength but also the location are taken into consideration in the former; the dividing result may fully reflect the regional balance since fully considering the relationship of subordination among those cities. On one hand, "bottom-up "method could reflect the regional balance well while "top-down" method would neglect it instead; on another hand, "bottom-up" method could not ensure central cities with high comprehensively capable are all divided as high level ones in the case that those central cities are of about the same strength and being close while "top-down" method can make it. But as a completely different method from traditional ones, "bottom-up" method reflects a new study thinking which deserves researchers to make theoretical and empirical exploration further.

Key words: spatial linkage, bottom up, urban hinterland, Jiangsu Province