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This paper develops a spatial platform for economic agglomerations that can represent a hierarchical structure of cities, towns, and so on. A global system models geographical distribution of a system of cities, while population size and local geography of each city are modeled by an individual square lattice network. The mechanism of economic agglomeration is described by economic geography models with the replicator dynamics. As a major theoretical contribution of this paper, we elucidate the bifurcation mechanism of the mono-centric distribution in a square domain. Such bifurcation expresses how satellite places appear around a large city. This bifurcation behavior, called sustaining bifurcation, is different from symmetry-breaking bifurcation studied in nonlinear mathematics, and is not given much attention in economic geography, despite its importance. An air-network of cities with the seven largest hub airports in USA is employed as a realistic example, and is modeled as a global–local system comprising a series of local square lattices with different sizes connected by an equidistant economy. This system for an economic geography model displays successive sustaining bifurcations occurring many times leading to gradual emergence of satellite places around a large city.

To achieve the Paris Agreement’s goals, many cities are building satellite cities to relieve the population and environment pressure of the central city. However, past experiences showed that long-term effects of such a solution were partially limited, due to limited attention on the effects of energy consumption and carbon emissions, depending on the dynamics of population and industrial development. This paper overcomes the previous limitations, applying a Long-range Energy Alternatives Planning model to the area of Xiong’an New District, an area extending from Hebei province (China) and nearby Beijing, is planned to support the development of Beijing. The proposed model was based on three different population migration, industrial and transposition scenarios to test their impacts on urban greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Results show that: (1) Increased population and building area will markedly increase GHG emissions from residential consumption in Hebei province, while slightly decrease GHG emissions in Beijing. (2) Green planning, including industrial structure changes, industrial transformation, will markedly decrease the GHG emissions in Hebei provinces and it can take down for the emissions increase due to the population migration. This paper proved the effectiveness of a multi-scalar, multi-dimensional, and multi-actor modeling approach for a satellite city and new town development planning, implying that a similar approach could be applied in planning and managing the development of future satellite cities.