Spatio-Temporal Differentiation of Urban-Rural Equalized Development at the County Level in Chengdu

Urban-rural equalized development (URED) is recognized as strongly contributing to the narrowing of societal, economic, life, and environmental gaps between urban and rural areas and is also an effective way to solve the “three rural issues” of rapid industrialization and urbanization in China. This paper explores the spatio-temporal patterns of URED in the state-designated experimental zone of Chengdu at a county level by using quantitative survey data from 2004 to 2013. The major findings are as follows: (1) the regions that are closer to the central city of Chengdu had a more optimistic urban-rural equalized development outlook (i.e., the three-tier geographical distribution phenomenon); (2) this distribution characteristic was gradually broken up in the process of urban and rural integration, and the differences between the three tiers has been narrowing; and (3) the gap between urban and rural areas has been significantly improved and exhibited a higher dynamic degree in the second and third tiers than in the first tier, which suggests a new development mode that exhibits better quality and higher sustainability. Given these results, the development orientation and strategy of each tier are discussed according to the characteristics of urban and rural equalized development.