ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Opportunities and challenges of developing intermediate cities in achieving inclusive integrated urban-rural development: discussion on the roles of counties in China’s urbanization

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Poster Track 07 | INCLUSION

Speaker

Ms Wenqi Li (Tongji University)

Description

Inclusive urban and rural development emphasizes a more equitable and sustainable society by ensuring the same economic opportunities and social welfare between urban and rural. Recent decades have witnessed unprecedented rapid urbanization worldwide, with the global urbanization rate rising from 47% in 2000 to 57% in 2023. The ongoing massive rural-urban migration, especially the inflows into megacities and urban agglomerations, has not only widened the urban and rural divide, but also exacerbated the unbalanced regional growth between metropolises and small cities as well as towns. While much attention has been paid to the core megacities, there is a notable lack of attention to medium-sized, or intermediate cities, which are home to almost 20% of the world’s population and one third of the total urban population according to the UCLG database. Although the definitions of intermediate cities may vary from country to country based on their specific contexts, particularly over the demographic size, the importance of intermediate cities in bridging urban and rural have been generally recognized whether in developed or developing countries (Rodríguez‐Pose and Griffiths, 2021), including providing economic opportunities and access to basic services for rural areas, participating in the regional industrial chains, and offering more local characteristic and unique amenities. On the other hand, certain shortcomings and challenges remain during the modernization of intermediate cities, which clearly requires greater research attention. Understanding and strengthening the links between these cities and towns and their rural areas has become of paramount importance in order to foster sustainable, equitable and inclusive territorial development.

This paper will take a closer look at intermediate cities in developing countries, drawing on China’s evidence, and synthesize arguments from new and existing literature to highlight the opportunities and challenges of intermediate cities in achieving inclusive urban-rural development. As China enters the late stage of urbanization, one of the most challenging social inequalities is the acute urban-rural divide. The importance of counties, which have long been the basic municipal unit in China, in alleviating urban-rural gap and promoting rural modernization has been increasingly emphasized in both academic and political discourse. With a particular focus on counties in achieving urban-rural inclusive development, this paper consists of three main parts. Firstly, using census data, the overall role of counties in China’s urbanization history since 2000 till 2025 will be reviewed based on the migration and economic contributions. Secondly, three counties of various urbanization stages in Yangtze Delta region will be selected as empirical cases to illustrate how the intermediate cities have grown and what strategies have been adopted to pursue the equality of economic opportunities and the fair quality of social welfare between urban and rural. Thirdly, the challenges faced by intermediate cities will be discussed from the perspective of lacking institutional capacity, industry investment limitations, self-financing difficulties, limited attractiveness to young people especially skilled people, governance incompetence and so on. This will be followed by a discussion of implications for future planning policy and interventions.

References

Rodríguez‐Pose, A. and Griffiths, J. (2021) ‘Developing intermediate cities’, Regional Science Policy & Practice, 13(3), pp. 441–457.