Residential Suburbanization Research Articles

Growing threat to urban retail? Residential suburbanization and shopping behavior change in Shanghai, China

Many studies found the rise of suburban retail in the Western countries had negative impacts on the urban centers. Although there is a debate on that the form and process of suburbanization in Chinese cities are different from those in the developed countries, limited research have examined the impact of suburbanization on inner city retail in the context of Chinese cities. This study analyzed the changing retail hierarchy under the process of suburbanization in Shanghai, restricted by the state-led retail regulations and planning. Then, we investigate how relocating to a suburban new town influenced residents' shopping behaviors given the local and city-level retail supply. An in-home household survey is conduced to examine the changes in shopping frequencies and destination choice, in particular the difference between the residents moved from the inner city and those from the suburbs.We found the combination of the construction land quota system, the “top-down” planning and the state land ownership have protected retail hierarchy of Shanghai. The transit oriented development (TOD) mode not only delineates the catchment area of the local retail supply of the suburban new town, but also connects those suburban residents with limited car access to the inner city retail agglomerations. The survey result indicates that the residential suburbanization hasn't significantly changed the shopping frequencies of the respondents, but is associated with reduced propensity of patronizing inner city retail agglomerations. However, the willingness to shop at inner city for comparative goods such as beauty and health care, and apparel is still high for those who used to live in the inner city. In contrast, there are significant reductions in the likelihoods of shopping at the old suburban town center for those who previously lived in the district. This suggests the rise of suburban new towns might weaken the old town centers of the suburban districts rather than the inner city.

How do suburban residents organize their daily lives? A behavioural time–space analysis in Beijing, China

ABSTRACT Rapid suburbanization in China is dramatically reshaping the daily life of urban residents. In China, long-distance commuting, traffic congestion, spatial mismatch and the low quality of life resulting from residential suburbanization are causing widespread concern. This paper compares the changes in time allocation from a time-use perspective, based on two activity-travel survey datasets collected in suburban Beijing in respectively 2007 and 2017. Travelling time to work has increased substantially between 2007 and 2017 and particularly impacted non-working activities. Working and commuting showed to have the greatest impact on time allocated to non-work activities, both in home and out of home, both maintenance and discretionary activities. Furthermore, residents’ allocation of time to non-work activities shows to be influenced too by their socioeconomic attributes, such as gender, marital status and household configuration (e.g. extended family). We found that the space–time constraints imposed by household responsibilities leads to greater gender differences in time allocation. This paper provides insight into how urban residents reallocate their time as a result of increasing suburbanization.

Is spatial mismatch really spatial, and really a mismatch? Recent evidence on employment among Hispanic and Black people in the U.S.

ABSTRACT In 1968, John Kain hypothesized that Black residential suburbanization had not accompanied suburbanizing jobs, leading to poor employment outcomes for young Black men. This paper reinvestigates spatial mismatch in the 2000s and 2010s, focusing on differences between urban and suburban White, Black, and Hispanic residents of the U.S. We find some evidence for spatial mismatch when pooling data across all years, and stronger evidence for mismatch among Black people than among Hispanic people. First, both urban Black and Hispanic people earn lower wages than equivalent suburbanites, all else equal. Second, urban Black people have a higher probability of un- and under-employment relative to their suburban counterparts. Third, Black and Hispanic people have longer commutes than equivalent Whites do, but suburban residence mitigates this effect. Yet we also find evidence that in recent years, spatial mismatch may not be as serious a problem as many people believe. For example, the wage premium for suburban people—White, Black, and Hispanic—has fallen. Further, urban Hispanic people are not more likely to be unemployed than equivalent suburbanites. Finally, urban and suburban Black and Hispanic people do not work in different types of occupations, so location is not associated with suburbanites of color holding more or less “desirable” jobs.

Impact of Urban Spatial Transformation on the Mobility of Commuters with Different Transportation Modes in China: Evidence from Kunming 2011–2016

Many emerging economies, including China, are undergoing rapid and large-scale urban spatial transformation. Thus, the daily mobility of transportation-disadvantaged groups, especially non-car users, has received increased attention, as these people may experience significant restrictions in their daily activities. Such restrictions raise issues with respect to transport-related social exclusion, which are detrimental to the sustainability of urban transportation systems. Activity participation and time use have been used to measure the spatial barriers and inequalities that travelers face in their daily lives. However, limited research has been conducted on how the daily mobility of different transportation modes has evolved over a longer period relative to urban development. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the activity participation and time use of car travelers in comparison with other transportation mode groups in Kunming from 2011 to 2016, a period of rapid growth in motorization. A three-layer activity structure was used to characterize the hierarchy of activity requirements. Propensity score matching was used to compare the mobility of commuters across different urban periods and transportation modes while controlling several confounding factors. Three conclusions were drawn from the results of the study: First, changes in urban form and transportation system cause residential suburbanization and a considerable increase in private-car and public transportation at the expense of non-motorized transportation modes. Second, the degree of impact of urban space transformation on personal mobility is ranked in descending order of public transit, cycling and walking, e-bike, and cars. Third, the traffic disadvantage of non-car users is obvious, and the mobility gap of commuters with different travel modes tends to widen over time. We discuss the consequences of transport-related social exclusion and highlight directions for future sustainable transportation planning research.

Urban Sprawl in Poland (2016–2021): Drivers, Wildcards, and Spatial Externalities

The COVID-19 lockdown in 2020–2021 and the refugee crisis in 2021–2022 were two new and unexpected social and political events in Poland in recent years. These “wildcards” will certainly have major effects on individuals and cities, both directly and indirectly, through the influence of “externalities.” The paper examines trends in the spatial development of Polish cities during the last five years (2016–2021), focusing on residential suburbanization and urban sprawl. The study aims to reveal the elements that determine the spatial scale of suburbanization, as well as “wildcards” that may have an indirect impact on the process but are difficult to quantify and include in spatial analysis. The use of location quotient (LQ) metrics, as well as a subset of the Global Human Settlement Layer in the spatial analysis allow for comparisons of locations with intensified urbanization throughout different periods, serving a task that is comparable to feature standardization from a time and space viewpoint. The analysis provides evidence of growing suburbanization surrounding major Polish cities from 2016 to 2021, while also exposing distinct elements of spatial development during a period that was marked by social and political stress (2021).

Functional types of suburban settlements around two differently sized Czech cities

While the suburban landscape around the North American cities is typical with a large functional diversity of settlements, around the Czech cities this diversity is still small. Recently, some Czech suburban settlements have gained new functions. Their suburban-residential function was step-by-step supplemented by service, commercial, working or leisure-time functions. The paper describes and explains the current functional differentiation of suburban settlements around two different-sized Czech cities – the capital city of Prague (transect south of Prague) and the regional capital city of České Budějovice (hinterland of city). Suburbs and semi-suburbs only with suburban residential function predominate in both case study areas. But in the transect south of Prague, new small suburban towns with services for surrounding settlements have evolved. In addition, new hypermarkets, retail centres and warehouses were created alongside the highways as a consequence of commercial suburbanisation. Residential suburbanisation there also encounters recreation in second-home cabins. Settlements in the suburban zone of České Budějovice have even smaller functional diversity. This regional capital city provides them with services and job opportunities.

Gender difference in commuting travel: A comparative study of suburban residents in Beijing and Shanghai

This paper aims to extend the current scope of gender inequality research to developing countries and to compare gendered commuting patterns in different spatial contexts. We focus on suburban residents in Beijing and Shanghai, which have comparable population and economic sizes, similar trends of residential suburbanization, but different urban structures. Based on data collected through activity diary surveys in 2017, We investigate gender differences in commuting distance and modes, and we find that the gender gap is manifested differently in the two cities. In both cities, women are less likely to commute by automobile but more reliant on public transport than men. But women’s lower transport mobility is compensated with shorter commuting distances in Shanghai, a city with polycentric employment structure, but not in Beijing with a monocentric urban structure. The policy implication is that polycentric urban development with efficient public transport services can allow job-housing proximity and reduce commuting burdens for suburban working women in Chinese cities.

Did Industrial Centralization Strategy in Shanghai’s Suburbs Lead to Economic Growth?

Industrial centralization is an important policy choice in the industrial economy era. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the overall performance and the influential effects of the industrial centralization strategy in the suburbs of Shanghai. The results show that (1) the strategy of industrial concentration in the suburbs of Shanghai effectively promoted economic growth; (2) on different spatial scales, there are visible differences in the impact of industrial concentration on the performance of industrial land; (3) industrial concentration has significantly improved industrial energy utilization efficiency; and (4) industrial concentration has narrowed the gap of economic development among the suburbs, but it has not resulted in a corresponding narrowing of the urban-rural gap. The main recommendations are to pay more attention to the high-end and centralization of urban industries in the central city, promote the interactive development of manufacturing and service industries as well as the integrated development of industry and city, moderately control the scale and speed of industrial suburbanization and residential suburbanization, promote the transformation of the traditional industrial land into “industry + R&D + business and office + exhibition” and further narrow the income gap between and within regions.

The process of residential suburbanisation as a factor influencing the financial management of municipal budgets: case study of population-small municipalities of the Czech Republic

The influence of residential suburbanisation on the financial management of municipalities is evident. The main goal of the research was to evaluate whether the process of residential suburbanisation proves a financial threat or an opportunity for specific small municipalities in the suburban zones of core cities in the Ústí Region of the Czech Republic. The research evaluates the financial status of the municipalities under review, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods (interviews with mayors, multidimensional indicator, income and expenditure analysis, balance calculation). The results show that the process of residential suburbanisation is a financial threat to affected municipalities. The influx of a new population forces municipalities to increase the capacity of local public goods and services, thus creating greater capital expenditure, with rising costs adding to the budget deficit. The situation results in conflict between the central level and municipalities. The central level requires municipalities to be more self-sufficient in procuring the necessary resources themselves. However, municipalities have limited tax jurisdiction, which they do not utilise due to moral barriers ofsocial closeness to their citizens. As the administrative process for obtaining subsidies is demanding, the capacity building of public goods and services is most often financed by bank loans.

Residential suburbanisation in the hinterland of Bratislava – a case study of municipalities in the Austrian border area

This paper provides an overview of the process of residential suburbanisation in the hinterland of Bratislava. The study focuses on the municipalities around the Austrian border area. The main aim of the paper is to investigate the characteristics of cross-border suburbanisation, which is a significant spatial phenomenon in the municipalities of northern Burgenland and the south-eastern part of Lower Austria. The analysis has a spatio-temporal dimension, as it depicts the time-space characteristics of the phenomenon – both for a single time point, as well as for a time series from the approximate beginning of the onset of suburbanisation up to the present. While monitoring the growth of the number of Slovaks in the study area, we observed a gradual increase in all the selected municipalities of the Austrian border area, with the distance from Bratislava being a significant factor here. The analysis of migration in the surveyed municipalities showed predominantly positive migration efficiency – immigration was negated by emigration only to a small extent (compared to suburbanisation in the Slovak hinterland of Bratislava, which is, however, relatively high). The structural characteristics of Slovak immigrants, where the younger age group of 30 to 44 years followed by a child component up to 14 years predominated, attest to the ongoing process of suburbanisation. The research confirmed the advancing residential suburbanisation and expansion of the cross-border suburban hinterland of Bratislava.

Building Typification in Map Generalization Using Affinity Propagation Clustering

Building typification is of theoretical interest and practical significance in map generalization. It aims to transform an initial set of buildings to a subset, while maintaining the essential distribution characteristics and important individual buildings. This study focuses on buildings located in residential suburban or rural areas and generalizes them to medium or small scale, for which the typification process can be viewed as point-similar object selection that generates exemplars in local building clusters. From this view, we propose a novel building typification approach using affinity propagation exemplar-based clustering. Based on a sparse graph constructed on the input building set, the proposed approach considers all buildings as potential cluster exemplars and keeps passing messages between those objects; thus, high-quality representative objects (i.e., exemplars) of the initial building set can be obtained and further outputted as the typified result. Experiments with real-life building data show that the proposed method is superior to the two existing representative methods in maintaining the overall distribution characteristics. Meanwhile, the importance of each individual building and the constraints of the road network can be embedded flexibly in this method, which gives some advantages in terms of preserving important buildings and the local structural distribution along the road, etc.

Postsocialist suburban governmentality: A shift from reactive to proactive discourse in the case of Brno, Czech Republic

The article brings a perspective of governmentality theory to the studies on residential suburbanization of the European postsocialist cities. By examining the accounts of the mayors of fringe urban districts and municipalities located in the metropolitan area of Brno, the second-largest Czech city, we identify two interlinked discourses – the reactive discourse and the proactive discourse, both underlined by a specific sociospatial imaginary of rurality. The lens of governmentality theory led to the focus on the mayors' understanding of the process, their position within it, the political tools they did (not) apply and the legitimation of their decisions. The two-wave research design (2006–2009 and 2019, 26 interviews in total) enabled us to capture the substantial change in the intensity of these discourses over time to examine how they relate to the construction of the boundaries of municipal responsibility within the challenging suburbanization process.

Does China's City-Size Distribution Present a Flat Distribution Trend? A Socioeconomic and Spatial Size Analysis From DMSP-OLS Nighttime Light Data

Inconsistent measurements of city-size and a lack of time-series information on urban socioeconomic development have hindered determining whether China's city-size distribution (CD) follows a Pareto distribution according to multiple perspectives. This article has attempted to evaluate China's CD based on the defense meteorological satellite program- operational line-scan system (DMSP-OLS) nighttime light data in terms of socioeconomic size (SS) and spatial size (SC). First, city size was defined from the DMSP-OLS data. Then, whether China's CD followed a Pareto distribution was evaluated from different perspectives. The results show that China's CD from 1995 to 2015 presents a flat distribution trend; the flat distribution trend of the SC is more obvious than that of the SS; “borrowed size” has become an important reason for the flat trend of China's CD; and residential suburbanization, transportation cost reductions, local government policies, and land finances could effectively explain the CD differences in the flat trends between the SS and SC. This article offers an effective means for quantifying and comparing CD in long time series at a large scale (e.g., national scale or regional scale) and provides a scientific decision basis for governments to build a reasonable CD system in China.

Fast and uncoordinated suburbanization of Vilnius in the context of depopulation in Lithuania

Abstract Like many other Central and Eastern European countries Lithuania has been experiencing significant socio-spatial transformations since the 1990s. One of the most prominent of these transformations is associated with the residential suburbanization of its major cities. The suburbs are the only areas in Lithuania where the population has been growing in recent decades, while the country has lost almost one quarter of its population. Although, extensive urban growth is a common feature for all large Lithuanian cities, it is more noticeable in Vilnius. Due to its historical and geographical context, Vilnius, and the region surrounding it, is in an area where rural-urban transformation also means transformation of the social, ethnic, and political landscape. The aim of this article is to obtain more insight into the recent process of the fast, but weakly controlled, residential suburbanization of Vilnius. The focus is on understanding the scale of suburbanization and its impact on the social and physical environment. In this study, we use quantitative data on population and residential constructions as well as presenting some visual material. Our results show that the new suburban-style settlements are spatially dispersed. New residential areas have emerged within the city limits, along its administrative boundary as well as in the most peripheral parts of the Vilnius metropolitan region. In terms of the morphology and physiognomy, a great suburban diversity exists in and around Vilnius, and different building styles are mixed creating a rather chaotic landscape, with little interference from urban planners and no clear vision for the future.

The impact of residential suburbanization on changes in the morphology of villages in the suburban area of Wrocław, Poland

Abstract Residential suburbanization is one of the most spontaneous processes occurring in the surroundings of large cities in Central and Eastern Europe. In the case of Wrocław, the first phase of suburbanization began as early as the second half of the 19th century. Its spatial scope changed with the expansion of the administrative borders of the city between 1924-28 and 1950-73, when dozens of suburban villages were incorporated into the city. In addition, during the socialism period, the intensity of suburbanization decreased significantly, which was related to the development of the city within the conditions of planned urbanization and industrialization of the country. The second phase of suburbanization began with the system transformation in the 1990s, and its scale and intensity increased in the 21st century. New construction in the hinterlands of the city has contributed to significant changes in the morphology of suburban villages, especially as the growing share of new buildings is multi-family housing. The aim of this article was to identify the most common trends in the morphological changes that affect villages located in the suburban area of Wrocław under the influence of residential suburbanization. Using the analysis of cartographic materials, field research and graph methods, a typology of morphological transformations of villages located in the suburban area was proposed.

Urban Sprawl and Its Impact on Urban Tourism in Romania

ABSTRACT Unlike Western Europe and the Americas, urban sprawl occurred only after 1989 in Romania, as well as in other Central and Eastern European states. Urban hinterlands have been radically transformed through residential suburbanization left in the hands of the free market. Sprawl has determined the decrease of open space around the cities as well as traffic congestion, higher pollution and other environmental and social issues. In terms of urban tourism, sprawl has led to the emergence of many suburban accommodation units, which provided a viable alternative to the accommodation in the city centre. On the other hand, urban sprawl has affected the identity of Romanian cities as it has created rather ‘placeless’ suburbs. This acts against the efforts of the cities to enhance place identity in order to attract more tourists. Therefore unplanned suburban development impacts negatively on urban policies in the field of tourism.

From prophecy to projection: the New York Metropolitan Region Study and the rescaling of the urban future, 1956–1968

ABSTRACT Between 1956 and 1959, amid far-flung residential and industrial suburbanization and with the joint backing of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Twentieth Century Fund, an interdisciplinary coterie of scholars from Harvard partnered with New York’s Regional Plan Association to produce a widely read ten-volume ‘projection’ of what the physical plant, political economy, and everyday lives of that metropolis would look like in 1985. This paper considers the New York Metropolitan Region Study as a peculiar, consequential exercise in how postwar urbanists recast urban temporality. Rejecting both the certainties of prophecy and the hazards of mere prediction, the Study sought to establish a new tense for urbanism and a newly disciplined set of methods for making inferences about the urban future on the basis of the past and present. The constituent volumes of the NYMRS garnered various degrees of influence in isolation. The sum total both furthered acceptance of a regional scale of operations for planning and decisively chastened hopes for political intervention on urban and regional futures.

Spatial inequality of bus transit dependence on urban streets and its relationships with socioeconomic intensities: A tale of two megacities in China

The dependence of urban bus transit on their covered streets is expected to be significant and heterogeneous in megacities. Using a bipartite network approach, we develop several weighted centrality-based connectivities to quantify the degree of dependencies of urban bus transit on streets. Two megacities with different road patterns, i.e., Beijing and Shanghai in China are taken as examples to depict comparatively spatial inequalities of the centrality-based dependencies at both local and global scales. Then, a series of spatial cross-section regression models are introduced to explore the colocation relationships between the dependencies of bus transit and urban socioeconomic intensities. The methodology of kernel density estimation (KDE) is used to convert all data with different scales into the same unit of measurement. Results indicate that there are significant statistical and spatial inequalities of the centrality-based dependencies of bus transit on urban streets. These inequalities with evident hierarchies, variances and clusters were validated by statistical analysis including power-law function, rank-size distribution, multiple variance indices, together with Global Moran's I. Besides, a majority of bus transit rely heavily on minor streets concentrating on circumferential expressways in central urban areas and radial highways oriented to outer suburbs under industrial or residential suburbanization. The unequal distribution is found to be strongly related to population, nighttime light intensity, transport-related services, and commercial and leisure services by the spatial regression models. A good spatial matching between bus routes' dependencies and socioeconomic activities intensities is found both in these two megacities.

Employment suburbanization in the 21st century: A comparison of German and US city regions

The empirical research on urban spatial structure and its evolution still lacks comprehensive, longitudinal and international comparative perspectives. At this background, this paper addresses the change of intra-metropolitan employment patterns by scrutinizing two relatively large and representative samples of German and US American city regions, covering the years between 2003 and 2015. Our analysis reveals strong differences in the spatial employment distribution between both countries. In general, US metropolitan areas are far more decentralized and deconcentrated than their German counterparts. While the trajectories of American metropolitan employment suburbanization were relatively dynamic with periods of de- and re-concentration, the development trend for German city regions has been remarkably stable. Furthermore, we found a relatively great inter-regional variety of spatial trajectories in both countries, involving the coexistence of stagnation, reinforced monocentricity, and generalized dispersal. However, polycentric developments have been relatively rare. Last but not least, we examine the potential drivers of employment suburbanization by estimating linear regression models. The results indicate that employment suburbanization can be mainly understood as a function of residential suburbanization and the development of the manufacturing sector, but we find strong differences between the US and the German context.

Proces suburbanizacji w strefie zewnętrznej konurbacji katowickiej – przykład Sławkowa

W artykule przedstawiono zmiany przestrzenne i demograficzne w strefie zewnętrznej konurbacji katowickiej na przykładzie małego miasta Sławków. W szczególności zostały scharakteryzowane zmiany zachodzące na terenie miasta po 1990 r. w zakresie indywidualnego budownictwa mieszkaniowego. Nowe strefy zabudowy domów jednorodzinnych zostały zdefiniowane jako obszary podlegające procesom suburbanizacji rezydencjonalnej (w granicach administracyjnych miasta, tzw. suburbanizacja „wewnętrzna”. Ich rozmieszczenie odznacza się specyficzną fizjonomią oraz „wyspową” lokalizacją w policentrycznym regionie miejskim.