Abstract: Recognizing the core commonalities and inherent laws of population development of world-class city clusters is a necessary path to understanding the incubation mechanism of urban agglomerations. Based on the collection of long-term historical population data and regional spatial planning data, we employ Lorentz curve, spatial Gini coefficient and other methods, taking the overall urban agglomeration and central city population growth as observation indicators, to compare the population of six world-class city clusters, and changes in scale, agglomeration characteristics and evolutionary process. The population of the six world-class city clusters has shown a common “life-cycle” development process, which is manifested in the continuous strengthening of population resource advantages, the hierarchical differentiation of population spatial structure, the prominent siphoning role of the central city, and the gradual narrowing of the gap between the total population of the primary city and the central city. In the process of expansion and contraction of different types of cities, urban agglomerations generally experience a transformation from single-core polarization in the first city to multi-point aggregation in the central city, the continuous strengthening of the urban agglomeration circle pattern, and the dual stability of the urban agglomeration order pattern. “Symbiotic” rather than “zero-sum game” inter-city agglomeration of population has become the main driving factor for the population development of world-class city clusters.

Keywords: World-Class City Clusters, Population Change, History Curve, Population Agglomeration, Symbiotic

摘要： 认识世界级城市群人口发展的核心共性与内在规律是理解城市群孵化机制的必要路径。基于长时序人口历史数据和区域空间规划资料，使用洛伦兹曲线、空间基尼系数等方法，以城市群整体及中心城市人口增速为观测指标，比较六大世界级城市群人口的规模变化、集聚特征及演变过程。研究发现，六大世界级城市群人口呈现“类生命周期”发展历程，表现出人口资源优势持续强化、人口空间结构层次分化、中心城市人口虹吸作用突出、首位城市与中心城市人口规模差距逐渐缩小的共性特征；世界级城市群普遍经历了从首位城市单核极化到中心城市多点聚集、城市群圈层格局持续强化、城市群位序格局双重稳定的转变过程，“共生性”而非“零和博弈性”的人口集聚模式是世界级城市群人口发展的主要驱动因素。

关键词: 世界级城市群, 城市群人口转变, 人口发展历程曲线, 人口集聚, 共生性