- Does polycentric urban spatial development lead to less commuting   389 kb by    Lin, Dong & Allen, Andrew & Cui, Jianqiang | lindy010@mymail.unisa.edu.au    Short Outline This paper revisits the study of how employment’s decentralization in metropolitan areas based on polycentric spatial structure development affects workers’ commuting patterns and job accessibility. Abstract Commuting time is popularly used indicator of a city’s transportation environment. Previous empirical studies in European and North American countries showed that apart from investment road infrastructure and constructing large-scale transport projects, land development patterns including urban spatial structure, jobs housing balance and densities can also have impacts on transport and commuting trip length. With the decentralization and evolution from monocentric to polycentric spatial structure that large cities have experienced in recent decades, urban economists, geographers, and planners have from various perspectives highlighted their interests on polycentric urban development. In particular, the study of how employment’s concentralized decentralization in metropolitan areas is based on polycentric spatial structure development affects workers’ commuting patterns (including commuting distance and time as well as travel mode choice) has created many intense debates. There are two major reasons for the debates. One reason is whether the evolution of a polycentric spatial structure and the formation of sub-centers in large cities could provide more opportunities to enhance spatial matches between the job and housing location selections of workers. Accordingly, employment’s decentralized concentration would improve travel patterns and urban environments such as shortening individual commuting distance and duration, less reliance on private cars as well as influencing their job accessibility. Another reason is whether and how mixed land use and jobs- housing balance policies minimize workers’ commuting trips as well as enhancing their job accessibility. Current empirical studies regarding the nexus between polycentric urban development and commuting are largely conducted in European and North American cities. Cases from China’s mega cities are very scarce. The nexus between urban spatial evolution and commuting is more complex than in western cities in the restructuring of urban China due to the profound fact that the evolution of urban spatial structure has been driven by the transformation from a centrally planned system to a market oriented system that occurred with market economic and housing reforms. This paper will review and discuss the debates of how polycentric urban development impact on patterns of commuting through a review and comparison studies of experiences in cities of European and North America countries. Furthermore, an empirical study into the impacts of dynamic changes of urban spatial structure on commuting taken into individual’s social-economic factors in Beijing would enhance and extend our knowledge of the connection between urban land development patterns and transport in a new global city. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper