Regional delineation of China based on commuting flows

Abstract

Delineating functional regions by association and connectivity has attracted much attention in urban and regional studies. Commuting ties reflect the social and economic interactions between places. However, most commuting studies are at the city level. A national-scale commuting map of China has not been drawn. This study employs computational and visual methods to model and visualize the commuting flows between county-level units. We use a dataset extracted from the 2015 One Percent Population Sample Survey of China provided by the National Bureau of Statistics. China can be algorithmically divided into new commuting regions based on the functional network of commuting flows. The results provide a valuable perspective to understand how people live, work and move across boundaries of administrative units in a daily urban system. Different administrative units in the same commuting region should have inter-jurisdictional cooperation to improve the efficiency of resource allocation and maximize the benefits of investments. We suggest that policy makers take commuting regions that cross administrative units into account when making regional transportation, trans-territorial infrastructure or investment decisions.