Evolution of jobs-housing spatial relationship in Beijing Metropolitan Area: A job accessibility perspective

With the urban expansion and economic restructuring, the jobs-housing relationship has become an important issue in studies on urban spatial structure. This paper employed a job accessibility model, which is an evaluation instrument to measure the jobs-housing relationship in Beijing Metropolitan Area from a job accessibility perspective. The results indicate that the population in the central city is declining, whereas the population in the suburbs is consistently growing and forming new population centers. However, the distribution pattern of employment is still highly centralized. Job accessibility varies in different locations, but the inner-city areas (within the Third Ring road) have seen improved job accessibility over time while job accessibility in the suburbs (especially outside the Fourth Ring road) has decreased, and this has led it to become a primary area of residential and employment mismatch. At the same time, the new towns in the outer suburbs have not yet demonstrated great potential to attract more jobs. In addition we find that, to some extent, urban planning changes the jobs-housing relationship, but a polycentric urban spatial structure is not yet evident. The floating population and related housing policy also affect the jobs-housing relationship. We propose some measures to resolve the spatial mismatch as well as some future research directions.