With the accelerating globalization and rapid socio-economic development,urban agglomeration has gradually become the major spatial carrier and main urban form of regional development.Present researches on urban agglomerations in China,however,have heavily limited to coastal regions,such as Yangtze River Delta,Pearl River Delta and the Jing-Jin-Tang,while the inland urban agglomeration has been largely ignored.In particular,the comparison between coastal and inland urban agglomeration has been missing.This paper chooses the typical coastal and inland urban agglomeration–the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration and Wuhan metropolitan area as the study case to measure their difference in terms of two types of urban flows,including passenger flow and information flow based on urban flow intensity model built on GIS platform.The result indicated that the urban Sows intensity of inland urban agglomerations is weak compared with that of the coastal ones.Moreover,coastal urban agglomerations are more mature in terms of urban system which exhibited in polycentric urban form while inland urban agglomeration is still mono-centric pattern dominated.In the end this article puts forward some suggestion on inland urban agglomeration’s development from the perspective of spatial planning
Peer-reviewed publication