Research Seminar – ONE COUNTRY, TWO “URBAN” SYSTEMS: Focusing on Bimodality in China’s City-Size Distribution

Research Seminar

Topic:
ONE COUNTRY, TWO “URBAN” SYSTEMS: Focusing on Bimodality in China’s City-Size Distribution

Speaker:
Dr. Kyung-Min Nam
Assistant Professor
Department of Urban Planning and Design
The University of Hong Kong

Schedule:
Wednesday, 27 April 2016 (13:00-14:00)
Room 829, Knowles Building
The University of Hong Kong

Abstract:
In this study, my coauthor and I demonstrate the existence of bimodality in China’s city-size distribution and develop an urban-growth forecast model that incorporates this bimodality. Main data for our analysis are 0.25º×0.25º population density grids for the past 32 years, created from China’s official census data and county-level statistics. Our results show that the mixture of two Gaussian distributions outperforms unimodal distributions in explaining China’s historic urban-growth patterns, suggesting that the conventional unitary urban-hierarchy assumption lacks ground in China’s context. We also find that the higher-density mixture component increasingly dominates the entire distribution, and this gradual transition toward a unimodal city-size distribution is closely related to increased domestic population mobility.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Kyung-Min Nam holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has been teaching urban studies and planning at the University of Hong Kong since fall 2014. His interests are in the institutional and policy dimensions of economic and environmental sustainability, and his current research explores the health effects of urban air pollution, climate cobenefits of pollution abatement, urban growth modeling, and fiscal decentralization, with a strong spatial focus on China and Korea.

~~ ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME ~~

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