Evolution Characteristics of New Urbanization in the Provincial Capital Cities of Western China

Urbanization is both a global concept and a project that is connected with all aspects of the society. China's new urbanization process has been attracting wide attention internationally due to its rapid development and rich content. This new urbanization has significant impacts on hundreds of millions of people's lives, as well as global wellbeing. Although Western China has always been in a relatively weak state of development when compared to the other parts of China, it has a large area and a significant amount of people, which all require a reasonable urbanization method. To show the development level of new urbanization in western China, we constructed an evaluation system and used entropy and weighted summation methods to get the development scores. We then obtained the correlation coefficient with the partial correlation analysis method. The results indicate that: 1) economic, land, and social urbanization are significant influencing factors; 2) temporal and spatial differences were significant during the 15-year period in these 11 cities; 3) among the factor layers, the score of social urbanization fluctuated the most, ecological civilization and economic urbanization showed an upward trend, and population urbanization and land urbanization have been relatively stable in the last few years; 4) for the western capitals, although economic urbanization and ecological civilization have achieved coordinated development in recent years, the endogenous power of the economy still needs to be tapped, and ecological development is facing greater pressure. Meanwhile the expansion of urban land has been too fast to respond well to population growth, which also damages the urban ecosystem to a certain extent. We conclude that it is necessary to realize the coordinated development of different factors in new urbanization, promote new urbanization, while considering the actual needs of the city and also developing the rural areas. This study can provide decision support for the development of new urbanization in the western region.