中国经济发展总体上已从“工业化时代”进入“城市化时代”。在此背景下，中国西南边境新型城镇化建设，应当成为区域经济发展的核心动力，应当成为“向西开放”的重要支点，应当成为提升边境治理保障边疆安全的关键手段。然而，我国西南边境城镇化建设在现实中面临许多困境，成为中国城镇化发展过程中不平衡不充分问题最为突出的领域之一。本项目拟将西南地区边境城镇体系嵌入到以国界为标志的政治地理和自然地理环境中去，将新经济地理城市模型和边界效应理论进行融合，构建一个“边境城镇链”整合模型。在此基础上，将夜间灯光遥感影像等新型数据与传统统计数据相融合，运用空间计量模型、空间可计算一般均衡模型等分析方法，对中国西南边境地区新型城镇化的发展机理、调控机制进行研究。探索中国西南边境新型城镇化发展、开放、安全三大核心功能的协同实现路径，为促进中国西南边境城镇体系健康快速发展提供针对性的政策建议。

The economic development of China has stepped from the “industrial age” into the “urbanization age”. Accordingly, the new urbanization should become the core motive of the development of the southwest borderland of China, should become the pivot point of the opening to the west policy, should become the key instrument to improve the borderland administrative ability and guarantee the borderland security in southwest region. However, the new urbanization in southwest borderland of China is facing several difficulties, the urbanization shows fairly unbalance and inadequacy. In this project, we plan to embed the urban system of the southwest borderland into the political geographical and economic geographical environment of the national boundary, and merge the urban models of the new economic geography theory (NEG) and the border effect theory to construct an integrated model as “city chain in borderland”. On this basis, with a synthesis of the new-type data such as night-time light data and the traditional statistical data, we will study the development mechanism and the regulation mechanism of the new urbanization, by using a series of analysis methods including spatial econometrics model and spatial computable general equilibrium model. We will search for the optimal path of the implementation of the growth function, opening-up function, and the borderland security function of the new urbanization, and will provide policy suggestions of promoting the rapid and healthy development of the new urbanization in southwest borderland of China.