A Nighttime Light Remote Sensing Based Urban Spatial Structure Revealing Urban Spatial Polycentric Structure Affected by Haze Pollution

As China promotes green and high-quality urban development, the urban polycentric spatial structure (PSS) has become an important means for cities to achieve environmental sustainability. There have been extensive studies on the impact of PSS on haze pollution (HP) from various views, but few studies have been done on how HP affects PSS. Thus, this letter aims to explore the impact of HP on PSS. To achieve this, the urban polycentric indexes were developed at first from the remote sensing nighttime light perspective. Then, the econometric models were employed to examine how HP affects PSS in China’s 206 prefecture-level cities based on panel data. Results show that HP promotes urban development toward PSS significantly. Moreover, this effect is moderated by the total urban population (TUP). For cities with a TUP lower than 5.777 million, HP is more conducive to promoting PSS. Reasonable measures should be taken to alleviate HP, and the government should balance the development of various regions to achieve high-quality and sustainable development in polycentric cities.