Urban Growth, Resident Welfare, and Housing Markets: Evidence from China

Abstract

Cities have become the principal platform of economic growth and residents’ settlements. The importance of urban growth in residents’ quality of life is increasingly evident, because of the intimate interaction between urban characteristics and human activities. Cities shape urban residents’ welfare, bringing benefits and disadvantages as well. The complex way in which urban growth and residents’ activities interact makes it difficult to figure out which kinds of urban features are positively or instead negatively associated with residents’ quality of life. This puzzle makes it harder to clarify whether cities can provide enough net welfare to their residents. Thus, there is a major challenge to understand and evaluate how and to what extent urban growth shapes the welfare of urban residents. The link between cities and welfare has been hotly debated, yet we still have a limited grasp of how urban growth may impact residents’ welfare. Most studies concentrate on a certain dimension of urban welfare and a specific geographical scale. However, the interaction between urban growth and resident welfare may touch upon multiple dimensions of welfare coincidently, and it may take different forms across geographical scales. This thesis focuses on urban growth in China, against the background of a newly industrializing and developing country. Through the housing market dynamic, its central claim is to explore the tensions between the positive and negative effects of urban growth on resident welfare at multiple dimensions (economic, social, environmental, and policy) and scales (intra-city, inter-city, and countrywide) from a spatial inequality perspective.