- Problems and strategies of urbanization development in Western China from the perspective of urban-based society - A case study of Shaanxi Province   698 kb by    Lv, Yuan & Liu, Kewei & Liu, Lin | 77672878@qq.com    Short Outline Serious problems in the urbanization process of western China are raised from the perspective of the urban-based society, taking Shaanxi, a well- developing and typical province in natural geographical features in western China as a case. Strategies to solve these problems are put forward. Abstract Urbanization in China has just reached 51.27 percent in 2011 and exceeded 50 percent, which means China has ended the times of village-dominated society and entered urban-based society. Developed regions of eastern China such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Jiangsu have entered urban-based society many years ago. However, the concentration of large scale of migrants to the developed regions has led to serious problem like population explosion, traffic congestion, environmental pollution, housing shortage, jobs crisis, etc. How to solve these problems and adjust the development to meet the basic demand of urban-based society is a new question in the following process of urbanization in China. The author studied the urbanization of Shaanxi, a well-developing and typical province in natural geographical features in western China from 5 aspects from the perspective of urban-based society, they are population urbanization, urbanization spatial layout, urban features, relationship between urban and rural area, resources and environment. The author believes that the problems mentioned below are the main problems in the process of urbanization in China at present and in a rather long period afterwards. First, low citizenization degree of migrants and increasingly prominent semi-urbanization phenomenon. Second, both migrants who flocked to megalopolis, big cities excessively and underdevelopment of small and medium-sized cities due to the lack of non-agricultural industry have made the urbanization spatial layout unreasonable. Third, thousands of cities with same face made the cities lack of urban characteristics. Fourth, the distance between urban and rural area expanded dramatically. Fifth, problems like decrease of arable land and increasingly environmental pollution are getting serious. On the basis of further analysis of the above problems, the author considered that there are some solutions to solve these problems. First, innovating social security system to make the rural migrants get the same social security as urban residents in education, medical care, housing and employment. Second, optimizing urbanization space, strengthening the regional core function of big cities and paying more attention to the development of small and medium-sized cities to make them regional growth poles. Third, figuring distinctive urban cultural characteristics and blending them to urban planning, architectural design and landscape figuring. Fourth, shortening the gap of the level of infrastructure, basic public service and income to coordinate the development of urban and rural areas. Fifth, strengthening the extent of environmental protection, specifically taking actions to let the neighboring districts cooperate with each other, raising the investment level of environmental pollution improvement, advocating public participation and raising their environmental awareness to make the living conditions better. The aim of this paper is to find ways to solve the problems and provide experience reference for similar regions like Shaanxi province in China, so that similar regions will avoid these problems or have better ways to solve these problems. Keywords urbanization development Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper