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4. Funded Research Projects

3. To distinguish the nature and extent of urban resilience in coping with

problems of polarisation and fragmentation.

4.5 Residential Mobility in Chinese Cities in the Twenty-First

Century: Implications for Housing Careers and
Neighbourhood Governance (on-going project)

Principal Investigator: Prof. Li Si-ming
Director of LEWI, Convenor of Urbanization

and Mobility Working Group of LEWI and
Chair Professor of Geography

Co-investigator: Dr. He Shenjing
Department of Urban Planning and Design,

The University of Hong Kong
First Source of Funding: GRF, RGC, HK
Amount Awarded: HKD548,200

Second Source of Funding: Faculty Research Grant, HKBU
Amount Awarded: HKD50,000

Brief Introduction:

The study tries to address a relatively neglected and yet important process

underlying China’s unprecedented urban transformation, specifically residential
mobility or intra-urban migration, which has major implications for housing career

and well-being of individual urbanites and also for neighbourhood sustainability
and governance. The focus of the study is on residential relocation since the

ending of the welfare allocation of housing in 1998, which has fundamentally
changed the meaning of housing to Chinese people, both as a consumption item
and as an investment. To unravel the residential mobility trends and the factors

underlying residential move or lack of it, and to examine the extent to which
residential mobility is related to neighbourhood governance and neighbourly

relationships, two interrelated strands of analysis will be undertaken.

First, based on two large-scale household surveys conducted in Guangzhou
respectively in 2005 and 2010, the trends of residential mobility and the

outcomes of residential move for cohorts of population grown up in pre- and
post-reform times and across population groups of different hukou status and

29 HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY | David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies