In traditional urban geography, city contact research is a classic study element in city research. In general, researchers use the traditional gravity model to characterize the contacts that exist between two cities. The traditional gravity model assumes ideal conditions, but these preconditions and their results often do not exist in realistic conditions. Thus, we used a modified gravity model to characterize the city contacts within a specific region. This model considers factors such as intercity complementarities, government intervention, and the diversity of the transportation infrastructure which is characterized as the transportation distance instead of the traditional Euclidean distance. We applied this model to an empirical study of city contact in the Zhujiang(Pearl) River Delta(PRD) of China. The regression results indicated that the modified gravity model could measure city contact more accurately and comprehensively than the traditional gravity model, i.e., it yielded a higher adjusted R2 value(0.379) than the traditional gravity model result(0.259). Our study also suggests that, in addition to urban-regional and metropolitan development, the complementarities of the basic functions of cities at the administrative and market levels, as well as the corporeal and immaterial levels, play very significant roles in the characterization of city contact. Given the complexity of city contact, it will be necessary to consider more relevant influential factors in the modified gravity model to characterize the features of city contact in the future.
