Regional Integration and Governance Reshuffling in the Making of China's City-Regions

Introduction: Background and Research Significance.- Conceptual Background: The City-Region and its Economic and Institutional Integration.- Empirical Background: Policies, Practices and Evolutions to City-Regional Integration in China.- Analytical Framework and Research Method.- The Assessment of Economic and Institutional Integrations of SDH.- Exploring Reshuffling Process of Governance Structure to Enable the Industrial Integration of SDH: A Case Study of SSSCZ.- Exploring the Reshuffling of the Governance Structure to Enable the Infrastructure Integration of SDH: A Case Study of SGSIR.- Conclusions.

Dr. Xianchun Zhang currently serves as the associate professor in the school of public affairs, Zhejiang University (ZJU). He has been a member of the Institute of Land and Spatial Planning of Zhejiang Province, and Urbanization and Spatial Governance Research Center of ZJU since 2021, and sits on the peer review board of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). Prior to joining ZJU, he was a research fellow at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and The Chinese University of Hong Kong (2019-2020).    

Dr. Zhang's research interests cover urban and regional governance, land spatial planning, urban spatial growth and land policy, with particular reference to the current phenomenon of urban regionalization in China with scale reconstruction and national space theory. He is the author of Evaluating the institutional performance of the Pearl River Delta integration policy through intercity cooperation network analysis, and his work widely appears in peer-reviewed international journals such as Land Use Policy, Urban Geography, Landscae and Urban Planning, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Urban Studies, Annals of the American Assocation of Geographers, etc. He is the PI of one national research project granted by the NSFC and participates in several major projects and key projects granted by the education department of Zhejiang Province, NSFC, the National Social Science Fund of China as well as the China Ministry of Education.