Enhancing Urban Comprehensive Capacity for Urbanization Development: An Empirical Application of China’s Southwest Ethnic Region

We can say that enhancing the capacity and functionality of urbanization is the key to China’s development. However, the urbanization development in various regions of China is unbalanced, especially in the southwestern ethnic region with relatively lagging behind the development. As a yardstick of urbanization development, urban comprehensive carrying capacity can provide a reference for urbanization development. Therefore, in order to promote the urbanization process in the southwestern ethnic region, this paper constructed an index system for measuring the urban comprehensive carrying capacity and used entropy method and coupling coordination degree model to calculate the urban comprehensive carrying capacity in China’s southwest ethnic region in 2003-2016 and the coupling coordination between its elements. The results display that the overall carrying capacity of cities in the southwestern ethnic region shows an upward trend in 2003-2016: By analyzing the evolution of different elements, improving traffic and communication capacity significantly, population and environmental carrying capacity are relatively high; while the degree of coupling coordination of each element is not generally high, and the comprehensive carrying capacity and element coupling coordination degree of cities show that the spatial and temporal patterns are “double high” and “double low”.