Socio-spatial Differ entiation of Professionals of Guangzhou in the 1990s
20 世纪90 年代广州市从业人员的社会空间分异

Under a diversity of impacts such as the industrialization of suburbs and economic globalization, China's urban socio-spatial structure has undergone tremendous restructurings in the 1990s. Using the 1990 and 2000 census of China, this paper examines the spatial differentiation residents working in different sectors of Guangzhou. It is found that industrial staff, high-level service workers, low-level service workers and governmental officials show quite different spatial patterns. First, the residential locations of industrial workers move from the central city towards the suburbs, especially Baiyun and Huangpu districts, while that of low-level service workers remain in the inner city, which is the traditional central business district (CBD) of Guangzhou; in contrast, high-level service workers accumulate around government buildings, universities and academic institutions, especially Dongshan District, Wushan of Tianhe District, etc; and governmental officials mainly live around their working places. In this sense, it is argued that one of the main features of Guangzhou's distribution of different workers' residence is the close connection between working places and residential areas. The underlying reasons are attributed to the sector restructuring of the inner city, the urban rapid sprawl, the infill of FDI within the suburbs, the adjustment of government development strategies and urban planning, land use as well as housing marketization, and the path-dependency of the 'work-unit' system. Using location quotient to analyze the residential differentiation of different professionals, it provided new research idea and method for further analyzing urban socio-spatial differentiation.