Category：Social Sciences & Economics

向心城市：迈向未来的活力、宜居与和谐 Centripetal Cities: Vitality,Suitable Living and Harmony towards the Future

By LU Ming

●Centripetal Cities is another book written by Professor Lu Ming on popular economics and urban development, after his best-selling book, Great Nation Needs Bigger City.

In Centripetal Cities, the author combines the latest academic research and field work results in recent years, with the situation presented by big data, to elaborate the internal development patterns of the cities in China. That is, with the proportion of the service industry in GDP and employment continue to increase, under the logic of “economies of scale”, urban development shows the pattern of “people gathering from rural areas to cities, from small cities to big cities, and from the periphery of cities to central urban areas”. This book also introduces the concept of “spatial balance”, starting from the three goals pursued by urban development in China –vitality, suitable living and harmony, and discusses how the national, regional, urban and rural, urban and suburban levels should focus on these goals, while trying to adapt to the general rules and trends shaped by “centripetal force” and to plan their future progress routes.

Author
Lu Ming, distinguished professor at Antai College of Economics & Management, executive dean of Shanghai Institute for National Economy, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has been awarded as Changjiang Scholar by the Ministry of Education of China, and has been working as a researcher at China Institute for Urban Governance and Shanghai Institute of International Finance Center, and as a member of China Finance 40 Forum. He once worked as a Fulbrighter scholar at Havard University and at NBER, a guest professor at Fudan University, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics and many other universities, a consultant expert for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.