Decision-Making for the Optimal Strategy of Population Agglomeration in Urban Planning with Path-Converged Design

The chapter aims first to identify existing population agglomeration and its efficiency, and second to simulate decision-making for the optimal migration strategy in urban planning to eliminate inefficiency among cities in China. First, identification based on path-converged design reveals inefficiency in existing population agglomeration in China because the population mostly agglomerates to cities with urbanization levels lower than 0.35 and the population gathers into areas with urbanization levels lower than the average level in large, medium and small cities from both regional and urban perspectives. Second, decision-making for regional population migration performs well in eliminating inefficiency. By emigrating about 14, 10, and 14 percents of the regional population from cities at low urbanization levels to cities at higher urbanization levels, inefficiency strengths between benchmark and regional population distributions shrink to 0.058, 0.041, and 0.056 from 0.1464, 0.0985, 0.1397 for small, medium, and large cities, respectively.