Defining urban and rural regions by multifractal spectrums of urbanization

Abstract

The spatial pattern of urban-rural regional system is associated with the dynamic process of urbanization. How to characterize the urban-rural terrain using quantitative measurement is a difficult problem remaining to be solved. This paper is devoted to defining urban and rural regions using ideas from fractals. A basic postulate is that human geographical systems are of self-similar patterns associated with recursive processes. Then multifractal geometry can be employed to describe or define the urban and rural terrain with the level of urbanization. A space-filling index of urban-rural region based on the generalized correlation dimension is presented to reflect the degree of geo-spatial utilization in terms of urbanization. The census data of America and China are adopted to show how to make empirical analyses of urban-rural multifractals. This work is not so much a positive analysis as a normative study, but it proposes a new way of investigating urban and rural regional systems using fractal theory.