The Unbalanced Pattern of Urban-Rural Spatial Structure and Its Evolution Characteristics——Taking Caidian District of Wuhan City as an Example

Objectives: To promote urban-rural balanced development, the primary scientific focus should be on measuring the urban-rural differences and recognizing the laws of urban-rural development. Currently, most of the existing studies focus on the urban-rural income gap, differences in public service allocation and urban-rural development coordination, with less attention paid to differences in urban-rural spatial structures. The urban-rural spatial structure reflects the spatial organization of the urban-rural system. Measuring the unbalanced pattern of the urban-rural spatial structure can help to recognize the evolution laws and mechanisms of urban-rural relations from a spatial perspective, which is of great significance for promoting the integrated urban-rural development. Methods:We focus on the unbalanced pattern of urbanrural spatial structure,take Caidian District of Wuhan City as the study area, and adopts the network perspective to construct multiple urban-rural networks based on transportation relations, enterprise relations and urban-rural comprehensive interaction coupling traffic relations, enterprise relations and attribute elements. On this basis, from the local perspective, indicators are selected to quantify the status and role of each node in the network; from the overall perspective, we create a balance index of urban-rural network spatial structure, and combine the network analysis indicators to construct the measurement system of urban-rural network spatial structure balance index, which measures the overall degree of balance of the spatial structure of urban-rural networks. Results: The results show that: (1). The transportation system in Caidian District was gradually improved, the connectivity efficiency increased year by year, the gap between urban and rural nodes was significantly reduced, and urban-rural transportation showed an obvious balanced development trend. (2). The spatial relationship between urban and rural enterprises in Caidian District is characterized by a core-periphery structure. Caidian Chengguan, Xishan Street, Zhuanyang Street, Zhuankou Street, Junshan Street and other areas with superior industrial conditions serve as the core, which have played a positive and active role in promoting other peripheral areas. The urban-rural enterprise relation shows a trend of integrated development. (3). The comprehensive urban-rural interaction shows a spatial agglomeration and diffusion effect. With economic development, resources and factors continued to gather in the central urban areas such as Caidian Chengguan, Zhuanyang Street, and Zhuankou Street and began to diffuse outward. By 2020, urban-rural interaction had spread to peripheral areas, with urban-rural interaction as a whole showing a polycentric development trend. Conclusions: We put forward corresponding policy recommendations in combination with the characteristics of the evolution of the unbalanced pattern of urban-rural spatial structure, which can provide some reference for promoting urban-rural balanced development.