The Economic Spatial Structure Evolution of Urban Agglomeration under the Impact of High-Speed Rail Construction: Is There a Difference between Developed and Developing Regions?

It is foreseeable that the next few decades will be the golden age of high-speed rail (HSR) development, with many new construction plans emerging. The construction of the HSR will inevitably cause an impact on the economic spatial structure of urban agglomeration, but it is still unclear whether the impacts differ between economically developed and developing areas. How and to what extent do such differences exist? Based on the modified gravity model, this paper employs a social network analysis method and selects the Yangtze River Delta and Sichuan-Chongqing (Chuanyu) urban agglomeration as the research area to analyze the differences. The main conclusions are as follows. With the construction of HSR: (1) The network density and the average economic connection of urban agglomerations have shown a trend of gradual increase. (2) The number of core areas in developed regions has gradually increased, but there were no changes in the center of developing regions. (3) In developed regions, the new metropolitan areas are the cities that have benefited the most from the HSR construction. In developing regions, the central city with difficult topography benefits the most. (4) The network structure of developed regions tends to be more balanced. The edge cities in developing regions are getting farther from the center.