Understanding the Regional Integration Process from the Perspective of Agglomeration and Urban Networks: Case Study in Central China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article refers to the interest of the problem and presents it in a broad and profound way. However, it is difficult to call the presented conclusions groundbreaking. Thus, its contribution to the development of science is rather low.
The article must be checked in terms of language and editing.
Author Response
The article refers to the interest of the problem and presents it in a broad and profound way. However, it is difficult to call the presented conclusions groundbreaking. Thus, its contribution to the development of science is rather low.
Answer1: Thanks for sharing your different opinions. We acknowledge that the contribution of our research is limited because our research area is neither national nor global, but it is not without implications. In fact, the application value of our research has been put into practice in western Chinese urban agglomeration. As part of a long-term study, we hope to make further discoveries and make further scientific contributions.
The article must be checked in terms of language and editing.
Answer2: Thank you for reminder us of our nonproficiency in language. We will invite editors from MDPI to help us improve the language of the manuscript. Please refer to the revised version for details.
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript is well structured and well written. It is easy to follow the arguments and discussions made by the authors.
The paper discusses connection strengths between major cities and surrounding cities.
I still have a couple of questions/observations after reading the text.
You use the concept of “coupling distance” as a metric for connection strength. “Coupling distance” is based on the number of inhabitants in the cities, the GDP of the cities, and the highway distance between the cities. The “coupling distance” seems based on the literature review. But what about other possible indicators such as waterways, trains, etc.?
(Since I understand the Yangtze River is an important waterway).
Table 3: Text is very hard to read. It would be nice to see how you calculated the socioeconomic connection strength based on an example set of values for a couple of cities.
In Section 5, you write: “Finally, the real integration range of the whole urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River is far smaller than its planning scale, which implies that market-led regional integration process lags behind the original assumptions of government, resulting in some noteworthy spatial consequences.”
On page 6, you said the Chinese government approved regional development planning in 2015. Was establishing infrastructure part of this plan? And were the assumptions based on newly built infrastructure? If that is correct, the infrastructure itself is not enough. It seems the market needs to mature as well. What about supply chains? Do local businesses try to find suppliers nearby, or is that less important?
And what about the role of local politicians and administrators? I would guess they are also part of the equation.
(I do not expect you to answer all my questions, they are more out of curiosity)
A couple of typos:
Line 157: First character, t, seems to be a typo.
Line 324: 2013-2019data -> 2013-2019 data
Author Response
You use the concept of “coupling distance” as a metric for connection strength. “Coupling distance” is based on the number of inhabitants in the cities, the GDP of the cities, and the highway distance between the cities. The “coupling distance” seems based on the literature review. But what about other possible indicators such as waterways, trains, etc.?
(Since I understand the Yangtze River is an important waterway).
Asnwer1： Actually, the question you raised is the origin of our article idea. We are curious that since the Yangtze River has become the world’s largest inland waterway in terms of freight volume, have cities in the Yangtze River basin formed a good integration through water transport? However, after relevant inquiry, we found that except for a few cities along the Yangtze River, most cities still rely on railway and highway transportation. Therefore, we have not adopted the water transport distance as the evaluation index
Table 3: Text is very hard to read. It would be nice to see how you calculated the socioeconomic connection strength based on an example set of values for a couple of cities.
Answer 2: Since there is no Table 3 in our article, I don’t know whether my understanding is what you want to express. I understand that you want us to use a table instead of Text when describing methods and calculations? Therefore, we replace the relevant text description with a table. See Table 1 for details.
In Section 5, you write: “Finally, the real integration range of the whole urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River is far smaller than its planning scale, which implies that market-led regional integration process lags behind the original assumptions of government, resulting in some noteworthy spatial consequences.”
On page 6, you said the Chinese government approved regional development planning in 2015. Was establishing infrastructure part of this plan? And were the assumptions based on newly built infrastructure? If that is correct, the infrastructure itself is not enough. It seems the market needs to mature as well. What about supply chains? Do local businesses try to find suppliers nearby, or is that less important?
And what about the role of local politicians and administrators? I would guess they are also part of the equation.
(I do not expect you to answer all my questions, they are more out of curiosity)
Answer3: Indeed, although it is a bit difficult, I will try my best to answer your questions. First of all, convenient and fast intercity transportation is the basis for promoting the integration of urban agglomeration, but it is true that integration is far more than that. In fact, before the construction of new infrastructure, and before the approval of the Chinese government for the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, the links between cities had already existed. Therefore, our article actually used multiple indicators such as traffic distance, spatial barriers, economic ties and social ties, without emphasizing the construction of new infrastructure. Of course, as you said, the roles of market, local politicians and administrators cannot be ignored. Thus, this paper has considered social and economic factors, but it is difficult to quantify the role of local politicians and administrators, so we only discussed in the discussion part.
A couple of typos:
Line 157: First character, t, seems to be a typo.
Line 324: 2013-2019data -> 2013-2019 data
Answer : Thanks for pointing out these two mistakes, we have corrected them in the revised version.
Reviewer 3 Report
Please make the purpose of the analyses more explicit in the introduction.
Too little information on the survey data. What range of data was determined from the survey data?
Please discuss the methodology in more detail.
Why were these factors chosen for comparison?
Why did cities located up to 100 km from Whuhan accelerate to wards integration, the other cities were relatively slow
Please separate summary and discussion
Author Response
Please make the purpose of the analyses more explicit in the introduction.
Answer1: We have added a refined expression of the purpose of this article in the revised manuscript, please see lines 91-94 for details.
Too little information on the survey data. What range of data was determined from the survey data?
Answer2: We have supplemented the data used in this paper. Please refer to Section 3.2 Data in the revised version for details.
Please discuss the methodology in more detail.
Answer3: We have added a more detailed discussion on methodology. Please See the Discussion section for details.
Why were these factors chosen for comparison?
Answer4: we don’t know whether my understanding is what you want to express for your question is brief. We understand that you want to ask why we choose economic, social, transportation, spatial distance to compare the process of urban agglomeration integration? We know that in addition to these four factors，the roles of market, local politicians and administrators cannot be ignored. However, it is difficult to quantify the role of local politicians and administrators, so we only discussed in the discussion part. In future research, we will try to make up for this deficiency.
Why did cities located up to 100 km from Whuhan accelerate towards integration, the other cities were relatively slow
Answer5: This conclusion is in line with the law of distance attenuation. In fact, it is not only Wuhan, but also the other two central cities in this paper, Changsha and Nanchang. This conclusion has also been put forward in the existing literature.
Please separate summary and discussion
Answer6: According to your suggestion, we have divided the discussion and summary into two parts. please refer to 5 Discussion and 6 Conclusion for details.
