A Systematic Decision Criterion for Urban Agglomeration: Methodology for Causality Measurement at Provincial Scale

The paper employs the synergism theory and grey relative technique to analyze the inner nonlinear relationships among factors that attribute to process of urban agglomeration, and builds a synergic model to reveal the causality running urban agglomeration system. The grey relative analysis shows that the urban agglomeration system is an open and dissipative system, and it is affected by many factors, which are not just simple linear relative but relevant, non-uniform and irreversible. Meanwhile, the synergic model reveals that the key parameters that dominated the process of urban agglomeration in Jiangxi province are the rate of industrialization, percentage of urban fixed asset investment in the total fixed asset investment and the highway mileage on per unit area. Obviously, the simulated results are available in practice, so the nonlinear systematical methods can be applied to analyze the causality mechanism in process of urban agglomeration.