Monocentric or Polycentric? The Urban Spatial Structure of Employment in Beijing

Sustainability

Daquan Huang¹  Zhen Liu¹  Xingshuo Zhao² 

[1] School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, No. 19, XinJieKouWai Str., HaiDian District, Beijing 100875, China; E-Mail:;Urban-Rural Planning Administration Center, Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of China, No.9 San Li He Road, Beijing 100835, China; E-Mail:

关键词: urban spatial structure;    employment density;    subcenter;    urban development;    Beijing;   

DOI  :  10.3390/su70911632

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The spatial structure of Beijing has changed dramatically since the reforms of the late 1970s. It is not clear, however, whether these changes have been sufficient to transform the city’s monocentric spatial structure into a polycentric one. This paper uses 2010 enterprise registered data to investigate the spatial distribution of employment in Beijing. Using a customized grid to increase the spatial resolution of our results, we explore the city’s employment density distribution and investigate potential employment subcenters. This leads to several findings. First, Beijing still has strong monocentric characteristics; second, the city has a very large employment center rather than a small central business district; third, five subcenters are identified, including four in the suburbs; and fourth, a polycentric model that includes these subcenters possesses more explanatory power than a simple monocentric model, but by only four percentage. We conclude that the spatial structure of Beijing is still quite monocentric, but may be in transition to a polycentric pattern.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.