Regional Development and Its Spatial Structure in the Information Age

Since the 1990s, the impacts of ICTS on regional and urban social, economic, and cultural systems have been rapidly deepening and causing tremendous changes to the regional spatial structures. The impact factors of regional development are undergoing tremendous changes as the impacts of traditional factors tend to decline while the impacts of new factors continue to deepen. In the information age, the traditional elements such as points, lines, and surfaces are still the basis for the description and organization of regional spatial structures, but the spatial forms and organization modes have new connotations. Nodes, axes, channels, flow directions, intensities, networks, levels, attraction forces, entropies, etc., are often used to describe regional spatial structures. Therefore, the spatial structure is a classic topic for humanistic and economic geography, but it has also been affected mainly by new factors such as current ICTS and undergone changes of the times. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out related in-depth research to facilitate new exploration and understandings of spatial structure theories and organization modes under the impacts of ICTS. Humanistic and economic geographers need to give answers to problems such as “what is the proportional relationship and how is the constraint of the upper limit”, the deepening of the “Point-axis system”, and the new changes, new rules, new mechanisms, and new trends of the spatial structures of regional development under the impacts of ICTS.