Since 1950, the number of large cities has increased very rapidly – close to 400 now exceed 1,000,000 in the world. From 1980 to 2020, China's Urbanization rate increased from 19.39 to 63.89%. The influx of large number of people into cities in a short period of time brings not only economic prosperity, but also caused urban economic advantages are accompanied by overcrowding, environmental pollution, increasing criminal rate and other negative effects.
To better understand the mechanism of urban development and provide insights that can help policymakers solve these problems, theories and models have been developed. However, the application of the urban model, which originated from Western countries, in China has not been smooth because the model does not take into account China’s unique household registration system, also called the Hukou system, which impacts population flows and distribution. Meanwhile, with the development of science and technology, especially Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), e-commerce activities enable regions to break location limitations and join in national and even global industrial divisions. This triggers a new bottom-up rural urbanization process in China that gradually changes population distribution and influences transportation needs. The impact of the Hukou policy and e-commerce on population distribution and human travel needs and behaviours needs to be integrated into urban models.
In order to achieve this goal, this thesis has accomplished the following two objectives:
i) This research proposes a transport mobility disparity indicator to describe the gap between traffic demand and accessibility for different communities. The indicator identifies the accessibility by urban points of interest (POI) (e.g. distribution of working place, park, school, hospital, supermarket, bus, and metro stations, etc.), by community/hukou policy types (local hukou/city residents vs non-local hukou/migrant residents), along with their average transport cost to income ratios. The lower the ratio of the average transport costs to average incomes of a community and the more POI factors in the surrounding areas, the lower the transport impedance indicator of the community, and vice versa. Greater transport impedance disparity indicators between different communities in the same city indicate a larger gap in transport impedance. This can help urban planners identify how severe the unequal relationship is between different areas and provide decision-making support for future urban planning and administrative policies. In this study, Xi'an, capital city of Shaanxi province in China, was chosen as the research object to calculate the transport impedance disparity indicator between local and non-local hukou residents’ communities. The result indicates that the transport impedance disparity indicator effectively reveals the different treatments between local and non-local hukou residents’ communities in the same city. Compared to local hukou residents, non-local hukou residents experience clear disadvantages in terms of accessibility.
ii) To better understand and analyse the impact of e-commerce on population distribution, based on a concept framework of E-urbanism, which is defined to describe the impact of e-commerce and migration on urbanism, this thesis employs a term “land attraction” to represent the ability of an area to provide job opportunities and life services to meet the needs of residents (e.g., people that are required to be housed, educated, employed, shopping and etc.). Based on that, the land attraction significantly impacts on population distribution, this research did a case study in China to explore the relationship between land attraction and emerging Taobao villages from 2019 to 2021. The result shows that land attraction can effectively predict population distribution.
