Panacea, placebo or pathogen? An evaluation of the integrated performance of polycentric urban structures in the Chinese prefectural city-regions

Although the polycentric urban structure is perceived as a bridging concept to achieve various policy goals, such as promoting economic efficiency, diminishing spatial inequity, and encouraging environmental sustainability, most studies tend to focus only on a singular dimension of polycentricity. Drawing on the non-radial direction distance function approach, our study aimed to provide a three-dimensional integrated assessment of the benefits of polycentric spatial structure in the Chinese prefectural city-regions. However, our findings were not as expected; specifically, a lower degree of polycentric city structure is robustly associated with better overall performance, and this performance is size-dependent and dominated by economic efficiency. These results shed light on the prevailing role of agglomeration economies and suggest that a polycentric-oriented spatial strategy may not be a feasible policy for Chinese prefecture-level cities.