Geographic Effects and Agglomeration Evolution: A Data-mining Analysis

Economic agglomeration is a common geographical phenomenon in the industrial society. It occurs in different scale of geography, and has a variety of spatial structures. There are two opinions about the geographical effects on urban evolution. One is to believe that geography plays an important role in the formation and development of cities. The other is to view the economies of agglomeration as the driving factor, where geography simply determines urban locations. To explore the opinions mentioned above, this paper uses the data mining techniques to examine the relationships between urban location and geography in the formation and development of agglomeration. It can be found that the emergence of industrial agglomeration is more influenced by the first-nature geography than by the second-nature geography, but the first-and-a-half-nature geography and second-nature geography as well largely influence the development of economic agglomeration.