Social Impacts Of Alternative Land Use Developments In Beijing: Applying Opensource Data In A New Recursive Spatial Equilibrium Model

This paper is to report our recent research that examines the impacts on social equity of the current trend (a concentric and contiguous expansion) with other three alternative development scenarios, i.e. decentralisation, densification and spatial mismatch between jobs and housing for Beijing towards 2050, through a new methodology - a recursive spatial equilibrium (RSE) simulation model for the Beijing city region. It extends an existing RSE model developed by Jin et al (2013), through differentiating households by applying the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP) schema. It also addresses the lack of data, which is a common problem in developing cities, by supplementing the traditional statistics with opensource data. The model results show that the siting of future growth in housing and jobs in the next four decades does matter for job accessibility and wellbeing of the poor.