江苏省社会空间分异格局与发育机制OA

Socio-spatial differentiation is a key lens through which regional inequality,public service mismatch,and the spatial basis of common prosperity can be understood.Existing research has provided extensive evidence of intra-urban differentiation in large cities,but less attention has been paid to how social groups and resources are reorganized within provinces,particularly at the township and subdistrict scales.This scale is especially important in highly urbanized and regionally integrated provinces,where social differentiation is shaped not only by internal urban structures but also by provincial development gradients,transport corridors,county-level hierarchies,and urban-rural interactions.Taking Jiangsu Province,one of China's most developed coastal provinces,as a case study,this research aims to identify fine-grained socio-spatial differentiation patterns among townships and sub-districts and to explain the mechanisms through which these patterns are produced.This study used 1,423 townships and subdistricts in Jiangsu Province as spatial units and integrated Baidu Huiyan population profile data with nighttime light data.A multidimensional indicator system was constructed to capture population size and density,age structure,income level,consumption capacity,and educational attainment.Natural break classification was first applied to reveal the spatial distribution of individual social attributes,and population-weighted k-means clustering was then used to identify the major socio-spatial types.By incorporating the population size of each township or sub-district into the clustering procedure,this approach avoids treating sparsely populated peripheral units and densely populated urban units as equally influential,thereby improving the social interpretability of the classification results.The results indicate that socio-spatial differentiation in Jiangsu Province is characterized by a clear multiscale nested structure.At the provincial scale,higher-level social attributes,including high income,strong consumption capacity,and high educational attainment,were mainly concentrated in southern Jiangsu,whereas many areas in northern Jiangsu showed relatively weaker social and economic profiles.At the corridor scale,high-level social groups are organized along the Shanghai-Nanjing corridor,Yangtze River development belt,and surrounding areas of major cities.At the county scale,social attributes often decline from urban cores,development zones,and county seats toward surrounding townships,forming a concentric structure of core agglomeration and peripheral weakening.These findings show that provincial gradients,axial development,and county-level spatial organization are intertwined rather than operating independently.Population-weighted clustering identified four primary socio-spatial types.Urban core high-level social areas and metropolitan fringe new town-industrial park social areas are mainly located in southern Jiangsu,along the Yangtze River and Shanghai-Nanjing corridor,and around major urban centers.These areas are characterized by populations with a higher income,stronger consumption capacity,and higher educational attainment,representing the main spaces of social and economic agglomeration.Medium-development townships are widely distributed in ordinary towns,county-level nodes,and county seats,functioning as transitional spaces between high-level urban areas and relatively weak peripheral areas.Relatively underdeveloped northern townships are mainly distributed in the hinterlands of northern Jiangsu,the Lixiahe region of central Jiangsu,and the peripheral areas of prefecture-level cities,where low income,consumption capacity,and educational attainment tend to overlap.The resulting pattern is not a simple north-south divide but a composite structure of a core-periphery hierarchy,axial agglomeration,and hinterland continuity.The formation of this pattern can be understood as a recursive process in which economic gradients,factor mobility,and institutional arrangements reinforce each other.The regional economic capacity provides a basic opportunity structure for employment,income growth,consumption upgrades,and human capital accumulation.Industrial upgrading,labor mobility,housing costs,and commuting accessibility further select and reorganize different social groups across space,whereas administrative resource allocation,public service provision,development zone construction,ecological regulation,and the inertia of the built environment consolidate existing differences and increase the path dependence of sociospatial differentiation.This study contributes to the literature by extending socio-spatial differentiation research from the intra-urban scale to the provincial township/subdistrict scale and by revealing the internal heterogeneity of a developed province that is often obscured by prefecture-level or county-level averages.The findings provide empirical evidence for differentiated public service allocation,county-level capacity enhancement,and spatial governance oriented toward coordinated regional development and common prosperity.