In last 60 years, many countries have experienced urbanization to various degrees. Urbanization has been expanding and developing in the scopes and regions of certain countries and smoothly coming together to form processes of efficiency and complexit...
In last 60 years, many countries have experienced urbanization to various degrees. Urbanization has been expanding and developing in the scopes and regions of certain countries and smoothly coming together to form processes of efficiency and complexity. In Mongolia, urbanization began when the industrial base was established in 1933 with the support of Soviet Union Comecon(The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance). By 1979, the rate of urbanization was at 50.1% and this increased to 68.5% by 2014. On the other hand, the population of the capital city, Ulaanbaatar has grown rapidly. The share of the urban population in Ulaanbaatar was 25.2% in the 1980s and reached at 44.7% by the end of 2014, which equals approximately 1,314,486, about half of the total Mongolian population.
According to the UN report “World Urbanization Prospects 2014”, Mongolia was ranked 4th place by 65% of its overpopulation of its capital city after Hong Kong SAR (100%), Singapore (100%), and Kuwait (78.3%) of the world. Even though the government of Mongolia put high consideration into this overpopulation issue and has implemented various kinds of projects and policies in an effort to address social problems caused by the overpopulation, the results fell far short of the goals which had been put in place.
In this context, this research was aimed to determine that are the key changes and effects that occurred in the city system due to Mongolian historical transition of 1992 from socialist society to a democratic society through conducting statistic analyzations on 37 cities which cover the key places with overpopulation, including the capital city Ulaanbaatar, 21 aimags (Aimag is a province, administrative unit of Mongolia) and 15 cities and villages of Mongolia and utilizing data from 1979, 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2014.
In order to achieve the research aim, the research recommended policy orientations to further solve the issue of over population of the capital city in the base of academic theory and Korean example policies to reduce overpopulation issue in consideration of several historical clarifications to first study classification population, economics, and function on overpopulation issue of Mongolia, then, to explain social problems caused by the overpopulation, and to review the policy changes after social restructuring last.
Also, in order to determine overpopulation of the city, using rank size rule of the city, I calculated the a coefficient and the primacy index for 37 cities of Mongolia. As for the a coefficient, it was 1.28 in 1979 and 1.33 in 2014 and for the primacy index, by calculation of comparison with the total urban population, it was 0.5 in 1979 and in 2014 had risen to 0.65. Furthermore, a comparison of the Ulaanbaatar population and big cities, are ranked at the second, third, and fourth by its population after the capital city, was conducted. Calculation results of the rise of primacy index from 3.62 in 1979 to 6.24 in 2014 shows that rise from the socialist period to the current period after transition, 0.05 for the a coefficient unlikely significant increase for the primacy index. Hereby, above calculations reveals that overpopulation had been occurred in 37 cities particularly in the capital city. Another calculation for the population density of the 152 khoroos of Ulaanbaatar city in order to determine the overpopulation of the capital Ulaanbaatar more precisely, shows that there is an highly centralized and imbalanced population distribution in 18 khoroos particularly.
In addition, it was determined during this research study that Ulaanbaatar plays a significant role in the country’s economy, therefore a Development Control Policy is not appropriate for the current Mongolian context yet. Instead, the research recommends putting a higher priority on a Function Distribution Policy to allocate capacity that centralized at the capital as one of the ways to solve this problem. The state policy on decentralization of the current Ulaanbaatar is being implemented through the residence taxation system. Nonetheless, this policy made pressure over the residents rather to solve overpopulation issues. Based on the experience of Korea, limitation of the facilities such as new construction and expansion in the highly centralized region is considered to be more appropriate.