Social-spatial differentiation of Urumqi City

Urban socio-spatial structure is the research core of urban social geography and also the hot research area of urban geography and urban sociology. The research about spatial differentiation and remodeling of China's urban social space becomes the focus of attention of many scholars. Urumqi City,Xinjiang,China,once as an important point of the ancient Silk Road,was the exchange center of East-West civilization,which unfolds multivariate culture peculiarity. Therefore,research on the urban socio-spatial differentiation of Urumqi is typical of this kind.Based on the data from population census and survey at street level,this paper analyzed characteristics of socio-spatial differentiation including the indexes of population density,floating,aging,education level and vocation in Urumqi and calculated the information entropy,the absolute differentiation index and the relative one from 1982 to 2011. The main results were as follows:(1)The socio-spatial differentiation of Urumqi is mainly showed in the differentiation of vocation which indicates the household income's one,while the differentiation of other social indexes such as education level is not obvious.(2)The populations of Kazak and Hui nationalities and ones with highclass education background were decreased from 1982 to 2011,while other social indexes became higher at this stage.(3)There is the social spatial differentiation in Urumqi,but the social-spatial differentiation index of Urumqi is lower than that of the developed countries in North America and also lower than that of domestic case cities,such as Beijing,Shanghai,and Nanjing. Overall,the socio-spatial differentiation of Urumqi is developing towards benign direction.