Urban positionality in the regional urban network: Through the lens of alter-based centrality and national-local perspectives

Urban Positionality refers to how differences in position and power shape identities, influences and access in the urban network or space of flows. Accurate determination of urban positionality is helpful for a city to formulate reasonable development goals and strategies in the context of close cooperation and stiff competition with other cities. Clearly, the same city may have different positionality in different networks, and different perspectives or methods will lead to different understanding of the positionality of cities. As an attempt by a new angle to enrich the understandings of urban positionality, this paper constructs a regional urban network using intercity calling data, and comprehensively analyzes the positionality of each city in the urban network through the lens of alterbased centrality and national-local perspectives. The results show that: (1) In an urban network, the influence of geographical location on urban positionality continues to remain significant, especially with respect to the centrality of the city; (2) The power space of the urban network has the characteristics of hierarchy and territoriality; (3) Rescaling is an important method to improve the positionality of cities at all levels; (4) Borrowed size is an important way for smaller cities to improve their positionality. At the same time, as an extension of the study, we believe that for some old industrial areas, the positionality transformation of city is as important as industrial transformation, as a regional development strategy.