Abstract
Socio-spatial differentiation has been identified not only in capitalist market economies but also in transitional countries, including post-reform China. However, most prior studies on this topic in Chinese cities are limited to a spatial resolution of the sub-district level, and finer scale analyses remain scarce. Drawing on this gap, this article provides a block-level examination of the socio-spatial changes in the central city of Beijing by employing the Beijing Travel Survey data, which contain rich socio-economic information. Latent class analysis and GIS visualisation are used to stratify the residents into different levels of socio-economic well-being based on multiple attributes and analyse their spatial distribution. The findings reveal a dramatic transformation of the socio-spatial landscape in Beijing in only five years between 2005 and 2010; 90% blocks show a greater than 10% increase or decrease in the average social stratification index of their residents. The socio-spatial changes can to a large extent be related to the market reform of China’s economy and housing distribution, which exerts its influence through not only commercial developments but also profound interactions with the public sector.
Highlights
Socio-spatial differentiation is one of the most common and long-lasting phenomena in human societies (Hamnett, 2001)
By testing with all possible combinations of the above-mentioned variables and different clustering numbers, we find that the model performs best when the class number is three for both 2005 and 2010
It does not pose an issue for our analysis since household samples from the two years are classified with two separate Latent class analysis (LCA) models instead of mixed into the same model
Summary
Socio-spatial differentiation is one of the most common and long-lasting phenomena in human societies (Hamnett, 2001). The term describes the dynamics involved in the uneven distribution of individuals, households and groups, differentiated by socio-economic status, ethnicity, demographic characteristics and lifestyles, among other variables (Kabisch et al, 2012; Knox and Pinch, 2014). It has been identified in capitalist market economies (Atkinson, 2000; Hamnett, 2001; Musterd, 2005; Musterd and Ostendorf, 2013; Walks, 2001), and in transitional countries (Marcinczak and Sagan, 2011; Sykora and Bouzarovski, 2012). With an enlarged income disparity and the replacement of the welfare housing distribution by the housing market, Chinese cities are undergoing an on-going process of socio-spatial differentiation (Li and Wu, 2006; Wu, 2002; Wu and Li, 2005; Wu et al, 2014)
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