Impacts of Urban Amenities on Socio-Spatial Differentiation: A Multiscale Analysis in Beijing

With the growing focus on people-centered urban development sustainability in megacities, urban amenities have emerged as an important factor consistently associated with residential differentiation and restructuring. Understanding how it relates to the structure of social space is essential to advancing spatial equity. The study developed an analytical framework that integrates functional characteristics and supply patterns and applied Multi-scale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) to examine how amenities shaped socio-spatial differentiation within Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road from 2015 to 2025. The results indicate that socio-spatial differentiation showed a rise followed by a decline across the three time points examined, yet its spatial pattern maintained a stable agglomeration characteristic of “high in the core area and low in the peripheral areas.” Significant differences exist in the roles of amenities across different attributes and scales. Market-driven factors, represented by amenity density and amenity diversity, typically exert their influence over larger spatial scales and are generally associated with spatial mixing and provide baseline opportunities for potential social interaction. Attributes such as amenity publicness and amenity uniqueness, which are more influenced by institutional and capital factors, primarily operate at local scales. While they are often associated with exclusionary effects in traditional core areas, they are also consistent with a certain degree of spatial integration in some revitalized districts. This study offers a more nuanced explanation for understanding the socio-spatial restructuring of megacities in transition and provides empirical evidence for advancing more equitable and sustainable urban governance.