The Impact of Urban Sprawl and Smart City Construction on Regional Coordination

The construction of smart cities has promoted the process of urbanization and sustainable urban sprawl, which may accelerate regional coordination by enhancing the spatial correlation among the cities. Firstly, this paper built the mechanism for the impact of urban sprawl and smart city construction on regional coordination and adopted the corrected night light data as the index of economic measurement, using the dynamic fixed effect spatial Dubin model to test theoretical mechanism. It is found that urban sprawl has strongly promoted the regional coordination, which is especially obvious among the neighboring cities. However, the construction of smart cities is not conducive to regional coordination, only when interacting with urban sprawl. The results of robustness check and endogenous treatment are consistent with the baseline regression. Further research shows that urban sprawl restricts the positive effect of industrial agglomeration but could promote economic growth and regional coordination through smart city construction. The policy enlightenment lies in that smart city construction should be promoted, so as to improve economic growth, and smart city network and urban sprawl should be synchronously promoted to accelerate regional coordination.