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Spatial capital or cultural capital? The residential choice of gentrifiers in Xuanwumen, Beijing

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Abstract

This paper aims to examine gentrifiers’ motivations behind their residential choice in newly built housing estates in the city center and what kind of capital they aspire to gain through such decisions, specifically in the context of Beijing, China, a non-Western metropolis undergoing market transition. Based on household surveys of residents in a new-build gentrified neighborhood in Xuanwumen, Beijing, a new finding has been uncovered that the main reason for gentrifiers’ residential choice in Beijing is to increase and reproduce their spatial capital and institutionalized cultural capital, which differs from the facts in Western metropolitan areas. In particular, gentrifiers in newly built housing estates highlight the importance of factors relating to proximity, accessibility and convenience of life, irrespective of their household type. These factors help to reconcile the trade-off between a professional career and daily life in a wide time–space zone, acquiring a high capacity to be mobile and thus increasing their spatial capital. Moreover, family households, the biggest grouping in this study, highly value education and schooling, which will enable them to increase and reproduce their institutionalized cultural capital. In doing so, these gentrifiers can consolidate and increase their high social status and at the same time distinguish themselves from other groups in Beijing.

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Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Source: author’s photograph, 2014

Fig. 3

Source: questionnaire, 2014

Fig. 4

Source: questionnaire, 2014

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Notes

  1. The Hukou system is very complicated. It is very hard to acquire a Beijing Hukou for someone who has previously held non-Beijing Hukou status. For a person who owns Beijing Hukou in street A, if s/he wants to change their Hukou status to street B, s/he must first acquire ownership of an apartment on the respective street.

  2. The information of displaced households comes from an interview with officials in the local Street Office and original residents from neighboring communities, and also from the website of Jun field Group (http://www.junefield.com/v3/History90.htm). Moreover, according to this information, we have learnt that old residents who accepted in-kind compensation have moved to Majiaobao, outside the south 3rd Ring Road in Beijing. Therefore, we also conducted a survey with them in 2014 (about 102 questionnaires and interviews). The survey reveals that a large number of them are in low-income jobs and have received a low level of education (workers, vendors and the unemployed make up 85.3%, while those with an educational level lower than university or college graduate were 89.1%). Moreover, these old residents said that the cash compensation received by people was equal to the price of the housing in that they re-settled in, which was far cheaper than the price that apartments in ZSE were put on the market for. As this paper’s primary focuses is on issues relating to gentrifiers, research on displaces will be discussed in another study soon.

  3. Every item has been assessed by five degree scores, namely “very important-5,” “important-4,” “normal-3,” “unimportant-2” and “very unimportant-1.” An arithmetic mean of 3.5 points, along with the households who scored 4 or 5 points, means that more than half the households view this as (very) important.

  4. As an inner-city district, the area inside the 2nd Ring Road has seen the growth of one of the main labor markets in Beijing, especially in the shape of the financial street on the west 2nd Ring Road which includes over 1500 foreign or domestic financial institutions, as well as West Chang’an Avenue which is home to many central government buildings and the headquarters of lots of large SOEs in China.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Akihiko Takagi from Kyushu University, Japan, for his genius support and valuable suggestions on this paper. And I also would like to thank other professors and members in the Department of Geography, Kyushu University, as well as three anonymous referees, for their help and comments on our research. This research was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, SCUT (2017BQ077), State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science, SCUT (2017KA02), and the Obayashi Foundation, Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Architecture, State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science, South China University of Technology, 381 Wushan Road, Guangzhou, 510641, Guangdong, China

    Xing Huang & Yuting Liu

  2. School of Resources and Environment, Lanzhou University, 222 South Tianshui Road, Lanzhou, 730000, Gansu, China

    Yongchun Yang

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  1. Xing Huang
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Correspondence to Xing Huang.

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Huang, X., Yang, Y. & Liu, Y. Spatial capital or cultural capital? The residential choice of gentrifiers in Xuanwumen, Beijing. J Hous and the Built Environ 33, 319–337 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-017-9566-1

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