Abstract
Decentralization and polycentric spatial structure strategies are important ways to alleviate urban disease in China. However, whether the urban spatial structure is meeting expectations is still unknown. Taking the Beijing Metropolitan Area as a case, the author adopted a non-parametric method to identify the subcenters, then an employment density model was used to analyze the spatial changes of employment and the employment centers’ impacts on the urban spatial structure. The results show that the Beijing Metropolitan Area was undergoing processes of employment decentralization, the monocentric structure was obvious throughout this time, but the polycentric model prevailed. The spatial structure of the Beijing Metropolitan Area was characterized as depicting “all centers aggregation” and the spatial structure of the central district of Beijing can be described as “subcenter agglomeration” between 2004 and 2013. The spatial structure became increasingly polycentric in the Beijing Metropolitan Area, but became more scattered in the central district.
Highlights
Since China’s Reform and Opening up, Chinese cities have been experiencing an unprecedented rapid urbanization process [1,2], with the country’s urbanization rate increasing from 17.9% in 1978 to 56.1% in 2016
This paper aims to investigate whether employment decentralization happened and intends to contribute the polycentricity–scatteration debate concerning the evolving urban spatial structure in Beijing Metropolitan Area between 2004 and 2013
According to the descriptive statistics of employment in the Beijing Metropolitan Area (Table 2), we can see that the total employment grew from 2004 to 2013
Summary
Since China’s Reform and Opening up, Chinese cities have been experiencing an unprecedented rapid urbanization process [1,2], with the country’s urbanization rate increasing from 17.9% in 1978 to 56.1% in 2016. Thanks to China’s six population censuses, many studies have focused on the spatial structure of the residential population of China cities and have found that most cities show an obvious trend toward decentralization and polycentricity [10,11,12]. The role of employment in the structuring of urban spaces is more significant [13]. The emergence of employment subcenters, not residential population subcenters, is considered to be an important symbol of a polycentric urban structure [14]. Studies on the spatial structure of the employment space in China’s cities are relatively few due to the availability of employment data. With the completion of the three economic censuses, research on the spatial structure of the employment space and its evolution is gradually emerging
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