Despite a large body of literature on residential mobility, little has been done in investigating residential movement using individual moving-into and moving-out records. This study aims to analyze the spatio-temporal characteristics of intra-city re...
Despite a large body of literature on residential mobility, little has been done in investigating residential movement using individual moving-into and moving-out records. This study aims to analyze the spatio-temporal characteristics of intra-city residential mobility in Seoul by using all of real records about residential history of 3.7 million householders who live in seoul by the time september in 2006.; 28million moving-into records were reported for the available analysis period from 1970 to 2005.
The analysis results of the research, based on actual moving records, can be summarized as follows: First, The median duration of residence at the dwelling unit level is approximately 700 days and the residential relocation distance from origin house to new one is 1.2㎞ in median. Second, population growth affected a residential movement ratio. That is, it has stabilized after the late 1990s when population growth was not much variated. Third, the residential mobility pattern is shown to be differentiated from life-cycles of householders: relatively short relocation distance and long residential duration for 10s and 40s. Fourth, the change of housing stock influenced by mega-projects for housing supply had a critical impact on residential mobility patterns: the ratio of moving-into and moving-out becomes unbalanced as development size is bigger. Fifth, the changing nature of residential areas in terms of housing type(eg. change from detached house to multi-family apartment towers) causes a change of residents. Sixth, the change of employment center can affect the residential mobility.
There are three policy implications from these results as follows. First, when we implement urban policy for community building, we need to consider the period of residential mobility. It is because it would be more difficult to build a stable community in a certain area, if its residential duration would be shorter. Second, dynamic residential mobility according to their life cycles indicates differentiating housing needs depending on the age of householders in terms of housing type and space. My analysis results imply that it be rational behavior to search for housing types more available for households' lifestyle. Urban planning and policy keeps sustaining various housing types at the town level to cope with the housing need differentiated by age. It encourages people to live longer at the same town so that it is much easier to build a stabilized community at the town level. Third, physical environment change can cause the change of people's residential movement. Either bigger development or bigger difference of housing type or quality can cause the more drastic change for people. It means that we should consider the effect of residential mobility of original residents, when we implement the urban policy for existing residential area. The issue of affordability should also be taken into consideration.