Residential Mobility and Post-Move Community Satisfaction: Empirical Evidence from Guangzhou, China

In the last few decades, urban communities in China have experienced unprecedented social and spatial changes under the heightened mobility, which is induced by urban redevelopment and expansion. Prior works of community satisfaction of Chinese urban residents gave little attention to the influence of past residential mobility experiences, which is insufficient to capture the dynamics of urban community in a rapidly changing environment. The paper attempts to address this deficiency in the literature by including characteristics of a resident’s last mobility experience in the model to understand the resident’s community satisfaction based on a city-wide survey in Guangzhou, China. The two-level linear hierarchical regression analysis substantiates the importance of the last mobility experience in a resident’s satisfaction with current community. It reveals that those experienced the “upgrade” relocation from informal communities to formal communities, or former work unit compounds to developed commodity housing estates, will be more satisfied with the community than those did not have such experience. It also reveals that the effects of a resident’s personal and socio-economic characteristics on the resident’s community satisfaction also heavily depend on his or her most recent mobility pattern. The findings in this paper have both policy and practical implications for informing community governance and urban planning in China and worldwide.