Residential Spatial Differentiation Based on Urban Housing Types—An Empirical Study of Xiamen Island, China

Abstract

Abstract:Residential spatial differentiation, also called residential segregation, is a representation of the differentiation of social stratum in economic income, social status, education degree, lifestyle, and other aspects, based on an urban geographical space. In this paper, Xiamen Island is taken as example to calculate the dissimilarity index and the multi-group dissimilarity index at three scales (districts, sub-districts, and communities) by using the land area, population size, and green space area of different housing types. The characteristics of residential differentiation are analyzed. It is found that both spatial differentiation and multi-group spatial differentiation have significant scale effects. The smaller the scale of the spatial statistics unit, the larger the spatial differentiation and multi-group spatial differentiation. Significant differences are found in residential differentiation among different housing types. The residential differentiation is, not only demonstrated in land area and population size, but also in the resources of green space. More importantly, a balanced allocation of green space will help to reduce the degree of residential differentiation. With urban expansion and social-economic development, residential spatial differentiation will likely change. An understanding of residential differentiation is a guide for urban master planning and detailed regulatory planning. It will help to promote social harmonious development and urban sustainable development by the reasonable configuration of land and resources.

Housing Inequality in Urban China: Theoretical Debates, Empirical Evidences, and Future Directions

“…Wu et al 2014). More recently, using a case study of Xiamen Island, Sun et al (2017) showed that the smaller the scale of the spatial unit, the larger the spatial differentiation.…”

Detection and Simulation of Urban Expansion and Socioeconomic Segregation in the Greater Paramaribo Region, Suriname

“…The poor were the most segregated, according to their higher DI m value. Compared to other studies, Sun et al () found similar DI m values for rich (>0.5) and poor (>0.6) residences in 2014 on Xiamen Island, China. Another study, of Hong Kong, also found that the rich were the most segregated group between 1999 and 2007 (>0.55); however, the poorest households were more evenly distributed (<0.3) (Yip 2012).…”

“…Residential characteristics were used to gain insight into the socioeconomic status of the population (Munyati et al ; Yang et al ; Sun et al ). Visual differentiation was based on five spatial residential characteristics (Table ).…”

“…The most frequently used measure of segregation is the dissimilarity index (DI) (Reardon & Firebaugh ; Farrell & Lee ). The multigroup DI m can be used to assess the segregation of more than two residential types (and therefore socioeconomic types), in terms of land area (Sakoda, ; Sun et al ). In this study, the DI m was used to assess the segregation of the four residential groups.…”

Towards Sustainable Urban Communities: A Composite Spatial Accessibility Assessment for Residential Suitability Based on Network Big Data

“…However, most of the studies focused primarily on the suitability of a single type of public facilities, such as education, healthcare, green spaces, etc. [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] Composite spatial accessibility assessments for residential suitability have still seldom been published. The reason is that the timeliness and advancement of assessment methods in recent studies, mainly based on traditional social and field surveys, have failed to meet the requirements of contemporary urban studies, which call for full coverage and accurate spatial data for the analysis of larger spatial units and a low updating cost in future studies [30][31][32][33].…”