sustainability Article Inter-Metropolitan Land-Price Characteristics and Patterns in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration in China Can Li 1,2 , Yu Meng 1, Yingkui Li 3 , Jingfeng Ge 1,2,* and Chaoran Zhao 1 1 College of Resource and Environmental Science, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang 050024, China 2 Hebei Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Ecological Construction, Shijiazhuang 050024, China 3 Department of Geography, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +86-0311-8078-7636 Received: 8 July 2019; Accepted: 25 August 2019; Published: 29 August 2019 Abstract: The continuous expansion of urban areas in China has increased cohesion and synergy among cities. As a result, the land price in an urban area is not only affected by the city’s own factors, but also by its interaction with nearby cities. Understanding the characteristics, types, and patterns of urban interaction is of critical importance in regulating the land market and promoting coordinated regional development. In this study, we integrated a gravity model with an improved Voronoi diagram model to investigate the gravitational characteristics, types of action, gravitational patterns, and problems of land market development in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration region based on social, economic, transportation, and comprehensive land-price data from 2017. The results showed that the gravitational value of land prices for Beijing, Tianjin, Langfang, and Tangshan cities (11.24–63.35) is significantly higher than that for other cities (0–6.09). The gravitational structures are closely connected for cities around Beijing and Tianjin, but loosely connected for peripheral cities.