ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Beijing, the national capital city, as a case study. In the existing literature on Beijing, V. F. S. Sit describes its basic population distribution patterns. Hu and Foggin and Zhou present the various growth rates of urban population across Beijing and raise the issue of suburbanization. The chapter focuses on the existing literature and the results from research on modeling Beijing's urban density patterns. The whole region of Beijing can be broken down into three rings: the inner ring of city districts, the middle ring of inner suburban districts, and the outer ring of remote districts and counties. The chapter utilizes data aggregated at both district and subdistrict levels and density contour maps to present the evidence of suburbanization in Beijing. It describes suburbanization as the moving of central city residents to suburbs, which leads to negative growth in the central city and positive growth in the suburbs.
