Changes and Trends in Jobs-Housing Spatial Relationship in Beijing over the Past Twenty Years: New Developments Based on Population Census and Economic Survey Data

The jobs-housing spatial relationship in Chinese cities has undergone significant changes over the past two decades. Taking the megacity of Beijing as an example, this paper adopts the GIS spatial analysis method to identify the spatial characteristics of jobs-housing within Beijing’s administrative region based on the residential population data by town/township/subdistrict from the fifth, sixth, and seventh censuses and the employment population data from the economic basic unit census in the same period, and reveals the changing patterns of jobs-housing space in different years since 2000. The findings show that the trend of residential suburbanization with centrifugal dispersion has intensified, and that the development of suburban and exurban job centers has become more pronounced after 2010. With regard to the change of jobs-housing spatial relationship, the jobs-housing ratio has remained relatively stable over the past decade. However, the attraction of job centers in outer suburbs has increased, and the jobs-housing imbalance between the north and the south of the city has become more obvious. The outbound/inbound ratio of urban rail transit further confirms these changes. The paper demonstrates the changing trend of China’s megacities from agglomeration to decentralization, which offers insights into the adjustment of the functional layout centered on the evolution pattern of jobs-housing spatial relationship, and also provides a reference for the construction of suburban railways and the optimization of rail transit networks in the future metropolitan areas.