A Review and Prospect on the Research of Urban Agglomeration

This paper categorizes the development on the research of urban agglomeration in China into three phases according to the research emphases and productions in different periods,discriminating the similar concepts that had been used in domestic research.We retrospect the theoretical development and the main views about domestic urban agglomeration research since 1980s from several aspects: the area bounding of urban agglomeration,the characteristics and the formation mechanism of urban agglomeration,spatial structure and evolvement,urban agglomeration planning,the development strategy of regional integration,economic conformity and management system.Then we analyze the deficiency of current research based on the retrospection.Finally,speculating the tendency of the further development of domestic research in the aspects of transportation,ecology and the intensive use of land.