The inverted U-shaped effect of urban hotspots spatial compactness on urban economic growth
Source: The Royal SOciety
The compact city, as a sustainable concept, is intended to augment the efficiency of urban function. However, previous studies have concentrated more on morphology than on structure. The present study focuses on urban structural elements, i.e. urban hotspots consisting of high-density and high-intensity socioeconomic zones, and explores the economic performance associated with their spatial structure. We use night-time luminosity data and the Loubar method to identify and extract the hotspot and ultimately draw two conclusions. First, with population increasing, the hotspot number scales sublinearly with an exponent of approximately 0.50–0.55, regardless of the location in China, the EU or the USA, while the intersect values are totally different, which is mainly due to different economic developmental level. Secondly, we demonstrate that the compactness of hotspots imposes an inverted U-shaped influence on economic growth, which implies that an optimal compactness coefficient does exist. These findings are helpful for urban planning.
Urban sprawl has been an area of active research over the past decades. In Western countries, some studies suggest that urban sprawl has led to environmental deterioration and social problems [1–3]. China, at its present stage of rapid urbanization, is also undergoing severe urban expansion which has resulted in the emergence of ‘ghost towns’ . Scholars have presented a sustainable concept, the ‘compact city’, to address these adverse effects. This concept has attracted attention, particularly after the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) advocated the compact city concept in 1990 as an approach to solve housing and environmental problems . Such cities are characterized by high-density and multifunctional land use and a compact urban form [6,7]. However, as opponents point out, over-compactness can place great pressure on the inner-city environment , leading to high house prices and social deterioration . Although the concept of sustainability represents a common and fundamental goal, the appropriate compactness of an urban area is still contentious. The optimal level of compactness to ensure satisfactory city performance requires further discussion.
Compactness is related not only to urban density but also to structure, specifically, the spatial arrangement of urban hubs and centres. The research on urban structure originated from the Alonso–Mills–Muth monocentric model [10–13] and Krugman's core-peripheries urban model . Both models attribute the agglomeration of population to the economy of scales and transportation costs for goods, and theoretically explain the forces driving the regional transition from isolated small settlements to a concentrated core urban area. However, given that the transportation costs for goods has been dramatically declining since 1960 , dispersion should have been dominating, resulting in vanishing agglomerations and limitless sprawls in cities . Multiple studies have demonstrated that the urban spatial structure tends to be polycentric when the population size increases, specifically with the declining transportation cost [17–19].