人口与发展研究所

讲座嘉宾：Jean-Claude Thill

讲座嘉宾简介：

Jean-Claude Thill is Knight Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He serves on the editorial board of a number of international journals, such as Regional Science, Geographical Analysis, and Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, and served as President of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI)（https://clas-pages.uncc.edu/jean-claude-thill/）.He has authored many publications in the highest-ranking journals of his field like Economic Geography, Landscape and Urban Planning, Transport Geography and so on. Professor Jean-Claude Thill is currently focusing on the research of spatial organization of socio-economic systems across scales. His recent contributions have involved leveraging spatial data analytics (including GeoComputation) to better apprehend urban and regional systems at a finer spatio-temporal granularity.

讲座简介：

讲座题目1：Are Chinese Cities too Large?

In 2006, Au and Henderson argued that Chinese cities were too small. They used an optimization model to support this contention. In this paper, the argument on whether urban population is too small or too large in China is empirically investigated with a theoretical equilibrium model for city size. While much of the research on urban size focuses on the impact of agglomeration economies based on “optimal city size” theory, this model is eschewed in our research due to, and we turn instead towards a solution proposed by Camagni et al. (2013). This equilibrium model is estimated on a sample of 262 prefectural cities in China with panel data analysis. Empirical results reveal that oversized and undersized cities coexist in China. Most provincial capitals and mega-cities challenge urban efficiency with excessive population. In addition, small and mid-size cities from more economically developed regions are likely to be undersized, whereas those from less developed regions tend to exceed the equilibrium population in relation to their low-grade infrastructure, weak city amenities, and city functions. We discuss the results in detail in this paper and draw policy implications.

讲座题目2：China in World City Networks: Evidence from Meso-scale Analysis

Chinese cities are increasingly listed prominently among the ranking of world or global cities. Such research fits within the body of literature that focuses on macroscale properties of the global city network and system. This study conceptualizes variant mesoscale structures (e.g., core-periphery, community, flat-world, or hybrid) in world city networks (WCNs) that enable us to understand the grouping features of cities with similar roles and positions, which are defined by distinctive relational patterns between cities as well as groups. In this paper, we study mesoscale structures in the world city network and specifically underscore the structures associated with Chinese cities. We use the framework of Bayesian-inference weighted stochastic block model (WSBM) to infer and compare latent mesoscale structures. This framework is superior to existing city-clustering approaches – which either ex ante postulates a mesoscale structure before clustering (e.g., the community detection method) or ex post explains the roles and positions of cities after clustering based on their similarities in attributes – and thus avoids the traps of methodological determinism and territorialism. We study a WCN of 126 cities, between which the relational strength is measured by the pairwise co-reference frequency of cities on massive Internet webpages collected by a webometrics approach. Modeling results show that the WCN reflected on webpages has a distinctive multi-cores-peripheries structure mixed with communities, wherein Chinese cities occupy a well defined position.