Coupling Coordination Assessment on Sponge City Construction and Its Spatial Pattern in Henan Province, China

Coordinating the "green" and "gray" infrastructure construction and the socioeconomic development is essential to sponge city construction. Most previous research has investigated the structural and non-structural approach for urban water management, such as operational practice, engineered measures, technical solutions, or planning management. However, there is a shortage of strategic management approaches to identify pilot sponge cities, which is essential to cities in developing countries under huge financial pressures. Hence, this paper proposed a coupling coordination evaluation index system to assess the coordination degree between economic development and infrastructure construction in Henan Province in central China. Then, the paper analyzed the differences of the coordination level and its spatial statistical pattern of the coupled and coordinated development of sponge city construction in Henan Province. The results show that: (1) from the perspective of comprehensive level, the problems of inadequate and unbalanced development of infrastructure construction and economic development level are prominent; (2) from the perspective of coordinated development level, the level of coupling and coordination development in Henan Province increased during the sample period, but the level of coupling and coordination development in each region was small; (3) from the perspective of relative development, Zhengzhou City is lagging behind in infrastructure, indicating that economic growth is faster than infrastructure construction, and other regions are lagging economic development, indicating that infrastructure construction is faster than economic growth; and (4) from the spatial statistical analysis, there is spatial positive correlation, that is, the area with high coupling degree of infrastructure construction and economic development level tends to be significantly concentrated in space. Studies have shown that Henan Province should focus on strengthening the construction of "green" infrastructure and increasing the infiltration of the underlying surface to counter the precipitation in urban areas in extreme climates.