Ran LIU, College of Resource Environment and Tourism, Capital Normal University, China
This paper evaluates the relative weight of local contextual factors (such as job and economic structure, social services, and environment-related amenities) in shaping the migrants' intentions of permanent urban settlement and home-buying. Previous studies ignored the place-bound "political-industrial ecology" that works differently on migrants' settlement and home-buying among different types of cities in the rapidly industrializing and restructuring areas. We use Multi-Scale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) to detect the variation in the environment-migration nexus at the city level in China. The results highlight the uneven topography of the migrant permanent urban settlement and home-buying intentions in "sticky places" in the north versus a more slippery orientation in the south of China. Stickiness connotes the ability to attract and keep migrant labor. It is puzzling why the north can sustain its attractiveness to migrants, but the more market-oriented south has become slippery where migrants rapidly flow in and frequently out. Compared with a home-buying fever in "sticky places" in the north that have negative environmental externalities, the migrants in the Pearl River Delta are more responsive to the environment-related amenities including green landscapes. The broader institutional approach should be adopted that gives more attention to the different payment willingness for environment-related amenities between geographically sticky and slippery migrants, as well as environmental injustice problems that arise due to these different contexts.
Mots clés : Migration|Political-industrial ecology|Settlement intention|Home-buying|China
A103363RL