Economic Development Zones and Urban Growth in China

China's urbanization has followed an original trajectory including during the last four decades a strongly planned economic development. The policy of creating Economic Development Zones is one of the major tools in use for modernizing the economy. We try here to measure the relationship between Economic Development Zones and urban demographic growth at disaggregated geographical levels (districts and urban agglomerations). An original database documenting EDZ characteristics and location has been collected at district level and coupled via a GIS to the ChinaCities database. We explore both to what extent the selection of places where EDZ developed is linked with the former hierarchical and spatial pattern of Chinese urban system and what impact the EDZs have had on urban development. We conclude that the selection of places mainly guided from national policies followed a hierarchical diffusion of this "innovation" in the Chinese urban system. Measuring the impact of that policy on urban growth however leads to the introduction of the hypothesis that other policies mainly inspired at local level may as well have widely influenced the spatial distribution of urban growth.