Reconfiguring Community Services in a Mobility-Oriented City Evidence from Beijing

Abstract

Job-housing separation and everyday mobility have become distinguishing characteristics of metropolitanization and permanent large-scale spatial restructuring of cities that is increasingly problematic to models of community service based on territory. This paper analyzes the effects of mobility-based social organization on the way the residents utilize community services and enhances structural discrepancy of the services. Through the particular example of Beijing, the study uses the trajectory-directed social network approach to study and examine the interrelationship among job-housing separation, commutative time, and the spatial structure of community-based social work. Based on secondary data, the paper shows that social relations among residents are becoming structured around rising comings and goings of everyday mobility instead of residential communities, which undermines informal supports and generates disparities in access to services especially to working-age commuters. The results also indicate that transit-oriented spaces serve as strategically relevant interfaces between extremely mobile populations, and skewed service dispensal systems. This reimagination of the process of community service delivery based on a mobility-based perspective offers the field of social work and city services a conceptual tool to evolve into a highly mobile context based on this community service framework.