ABSTRACT
At present, the economic development in Hubei Province has initially entered new era of “one principal two deputy, multi-polar development”. In order to further explore the future of urban development, we ranked prefecture cities in Hubei Provinces with the intensity model of central place function. Meanwhile, according to 32 selected indicators, we investigated the economic linkage between these cities with improved gravity model and principal component analysis model. Our results show that: 1) Regarding intensity value of central city z = 2, 0.9, 0.6 as the boundary, 12 cities can be divided into four levels with Wuhan in level 1; Yichang, Xiangyang and Jingzhou in level 2; Huangshi, Shiyan, Jingmen, Xiaogan, Huanggang, Xianning in level 3; the remaining cities in level 4, respectively. 2) According to the economic linkage value, the economic linkages between cities are classified into three levels: closely related, generally related and weakly related. Among them, the generally related and weakly related linkages are most likely caused by the cities’ own economic development structure or their long geographical distance from the economic central city.