Intercity Mobility and Coupled Landscapes of Multidimensional Regionalization in Western China

Intercity mobility lays the foundation for capital flow, information flow, and knowledge flow, etc., and is important for promoting regional integration. Although many scholars have studied intercity mobility in extensive well-developed urban agglomerations, few studies have examined the characteristics of intercity mobility at the county level and its impact on regionalization in western China. This study takes the Guanzhong Plain urban agglomeration (GPUA) as a case to study the geographical law of intercity mobility and then explore its impact on regionalization. The results obtained show that intercity mobility network exhibits a hub and spoke patterns focusing on major municipal districts at the county level. We also found a corridor effect that counties with higher travel volumes are mostly located along the trunk high speed railway (HSR) lines. Unlike previous studies, the distribution of intercity mobility is more concentrated than that of population and exhibits a super-linear behavior rule. There are the differences in gravity law for overall trips, weekday trips, weekend trips, and holiday trips. With the decrease of travel duration, the effect of attraction of destination is weakening, but the influence of distance decay is increasing. Finally, the spatial organization is still administrative-centric and is dominated by intra-prefecture and intra-provincial development. Moreover, the coupled degree between network-based regionalization and attribute-based regionalization shows a decreasing trend from administrative via cultural to physical factors. These findings enrich the research on the intercity mobility and the regionalization in inland developing urban agglomerations.