Residential Mobility and Post-Move Community Satisfaction: Empirical Evidence from Guangzhou, China

Sanqin Mao,Jie Chen

doi:10.3390/land10070741

Abstract

In the last few decades, urban communities in China have experienced unprecedented social and spatial changes under the heightened mobility, which is induced by urban redevelopment and expansion. Prior works of community satisfaction of Chinese urban residents gave little attention to the influence of past residential mobility experiences, which is insufficient to capture the dynamics of urban community in a rapidly changing environment. The paper attempts to address this deficiency in the literature by including characteristics of a resident’s last mobility experience in the model to understand the resident’s community satisfaction based on a city-wide survey in Guangzhou, China. The two-level linear hierarchical regression analysis substantiates the importance of the last mobility experience in a resident’s satisfaction with current community. It reveals that those experienced the “upgrade” relocation from informal communities to formal communities, or former work unit compounds to developed commodity housing estates, will be more satisfied with the community than those did not have such experience. It also reveals that the effects of a resident’s personal and socio-economic characteristics on the resident’s community satisfaction also heavily depend on his or her most recent mobility pattern. The findings in this paper have both policy and practical implications for informing community governance and urban planning in China and worldwide.

Highlights

IntroductionThe thirty plus years of economic and housing reforms in the past decades have brought radical changes in households’ residential behaviors in urban China [1,2,3]
Empirical Analysis and Findings Discussions. We conduct both conventional OLS model and multi-level model to verify the relationship between residential mobility and community satisfaction
Few have questioned whether and how massive redevelopments and change in population mix are associated with community satisfaction among various socio-demographics

Summary

Introduction

The thirty plus years of economic and housing reforms in the past decades have brought radical changes in households’ residential behaviors in urban China [1,2,3]. In comparison with the pre-reform era when the residence was determined by the state work unit (danwei in Chinese) and residential mobility (or intra-urban migration) was rigorously circumscribed, the rate of residential mobility increased moderately since the end of the. 20th century and reached above 10 percent in the beginning of twenty-first century in large cities like Beijing and Guangzhou [4,5,6]. Such heightened mobility has brought drastic transformation to the communities in urban China at an unprecedented scale. How to build up a place-based emotional connection with the community after households experienced residential relocation has been an acute social challenge, as the community accommodates a mix of residents which is still increasing and is the basis for social cohesion and urbanites’

Objectives

Results

Conclusion