Understanding spatial and compositional dynamics of employment centers in urban China: Empirical evidence from Nanjing

In contrast to abundant research on population (re)distribution in China, the dynamics of intra‐urban employment concentration remain poorly understood. Drawing upon firm‐level employment data for 2008 and 2013 at a fine analytic scale, we utilize a two‐stage approach involving nonparametric estimating and proximity‐based threshold setting, persistence score, location quotients, and shift‐share analysis, to investigate spatial and compositional changes of employment centers in Nanjing, an emerging global city in the Yangtze River Delta, China. We observe only a very slight trend in the dispersion of whole employment there, and over 70% of employment was concentrated in the identified centers in 2008 and 2013. Employment in different sectors indicated high spatial heterogeneity and polycentricity, which is associated to a distinctly greater extent with decentralization of manufacturing than with services. Specifically, the boundaries of employment centers ranged from stable in the urban core to highly fluctuating in newly developed urban areas; the sectoral composition of centers exhibited consistency within each center but heterogeneity among centers. We further discussed the relationship between dynamics of employment centers and urban configuration, economic re‐structuring, and local policies that have long determined development direction and employment distribution in Nanjing. We suggest that urban planning should consider diversified land use and dynamic planning of employment centers.