| Abstract： |
China's cities have experienced rapid and uneven development in recent decades, which influenced urban land prices crucially. Understanding the distribution of the urban land-price system and its evolution would help to provide an in-depth understanding of the development of China's urban system. Therefore, we combined rank-size law and fractal theory to analyze the patterns and variations of the rank-size distributions of China's urban land-price system based on land transfer data for 2007-2019. We concluded the following: (1) the rank-size law explains the distribution of the urban land-price system in China-the system was balanced and showed an equilibrium-disequilibrium development; (2) the actual land prices were higher than the theoretical land prices in southeastern China, especially in urban agglomerations, while they were lower in northwestern China; (3) the number of cities located in China's urban development system was decreasing, and the unevenness of urban land-price system was increasing; and (4) the imbalance of land-price rank-size distributions was higher in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Guangdong-Hongkong-Macau Greater Bay Area urban agglomerations, while they were more balanced in the Chengdu-Chongqing and Central Plains urban agglomerations. We suggest that the development of small cities in China has a large upside, which should be noticed. |
