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Abstract The urbanization in China is not a simple choice of the city sizes--large, medium， or small, but the urban agglomeration. Unlike the metropolitan areas, a metropolitan group is composed of a number of metropolitans that are relatively independent and balanced in terms of urban functions, yet, are distinctive, and complementary in terms of industrial links. Hence, the industry of the metropolitan group is an optimized platform on which multiple industrial chains coexist densely and orderly, and supported by a diversified cluster of industries. It mainly works as the constructive platform and organizational structure to co-agglomerate modern diversified industrial clusters. It is a competitive world-class industrial agglomeration as well as the major supported field and leading areas when large countries mean to achieve their national strategic goals. The key of the governance of metropolitan group is the collaborative governance of industry-city or industry-space, dictated by the interactions between the cities, industries and the population. As the platform for population agglomeration, the cities develop in accordance with the scale of their populations. In turn, population grows in accordance with the industrial development and the opportunities for development and self-realization of the urban residents. Therefore, industry development in the city is the key factor among the ones leading to the population agglomeration and urbanization. Nowadays, the development and the transformation and upgrading of modern industries manifest as the penetration and integration between the diversified industries and industrial chains, impelled by the knowledge spillover and scale economies . All the above means that the integration of complicated modern industrial chains needs a space, namely, an urban system composed by large, medium-sized, and small cities with the reasonable densities, ordered distributions, different functions, and complementary endowments, a space that is called modern metropolitan groups. This paper reviews the theories and evolution logics related to the collaborative governance of urban agglomerations, such as metropolitan government theory, public choice theory, and the new regionalism. Having compared the collaborative governance mechanisms of several metropolitan groups in the world, we find that currently in China, the collaborative governance model of the Yangtze River Delta metropolis group is the closest to the advocated new regionalism model. However, from the perspective of collaborative governance of Industry-City, the existing collaborative governance model of the Yangtze River Delta metropolis group still faces two challenges. First, it lacks of legislative protections and of related legal mechanisms as support; second, it lacks of the key elements of Industry-City collaborative governance—the networks connecting various market forces such as firms, industrial organizations, social organizations, and non-government organizations, neither of their active involvement in the collaborative governance process of metropolitan groups. At last, this paper proposes an Industry-City collaborative governance framework of China's metropolis groups that are composed of a series of goals and a supporting framework. The main goals are connecting, reacting, coordinating, and sharing. The supporting framework for realizing these goals contains three collaborative governance structures -- the urban system, the industrial system, and the social infrastructure of transportation integration and ecological environment protection. This paper gives a second thought on the development concept of the collaborative governance of China's metropolitan groups. The possible new ideas are as follows. Firstly, it classifies urban clusters into two categories: metropolitan area and metropolitan group by identifying their main characteristics, differences, and connections, defining the industrial space characteristics and functional characteristics of the metropolitan group. Secondly, it proposes that the key of the collaborative governance of metropolis group is that of Industry-City, and presents such a framework.
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