This project does not involve a research hypothesis in the usual sense. Given the emphasis on data management and display, the key objective for the project is to develop database tools and training materials that are understandable and can be implemented by colleagues at a remote site in a non-English-speaking environment.

The evaluation of urban indicators depends heavily on continuing collection of data through time, modeling of causes and effects, and monitoring of results. This initial project has only generated indicator data for selected time periods. However, to be most useful for evaluation, the indicators must continue to be gathered over multiple time periods. The primary emphasis of this project initially is not on evaluation, but on developing tools and training procedures to support collection of indicator data on an ongoing basis through multiple past and future time periods.

Although the key purpose of first phase of the research project is to build the necessary infrastructure for indicator data collection and spatial display, we are hoping to use these indicators to monitor and project changes in urban land use, environmental quality, and demographic movements.

With a permanent population of more than 13 million and land area of 6,340 square kilometers in the metropolitan area, Shanghai is the largest city in China (see Table 1).

The metropolitan area, governed by the Shanghai Municipal Government—equivalent to a provincial government because of Shanghai's special administrative status—consists of 17 urban districts (10 of them are located in the central city) and 3 suburban counties. Another 3 million or so migrants, largely from rural areas of China, reside in Shanghai.

For Shanghai, our preliminary analysis shows land use trends in the central portion of the metropolitan area (Table 2). During the entire period of 1946-1996, rapid urbanization has occurred largely after 1979 when economic reforms commenced. This concurs with the fact that urban expansion had been severely restricted prior to 1979. Economic reforms have unleashed the force of development and subsequently urbanization.

Another significant trend in Shanghai after 1979 has been the unprecedented influx of migrants, mostly from rural areas of China. Because of their official temporary status, they have very limited access to urban jobs and services. The municipality still relies on the number of registered permanent residents in the city (currently at about 13 million) in determining urban service needs, such as water, gas and electricity supplies, public transport vehicles, roads, and sewerage systems. However, the large volume of temporary migrants (estimated at about 3 million) is bound to have a significant impact on the delivery of these services. As a result, analytical models that help understand and project the geographical distribution of these migrants across the city will be very helpful for policy making.

Preliminary analysis based on district-level data shows that two variables—capital construction investment and total employment in industrial & service sectors—have significant association with the number of migrants attracted to each district. Two variables are used to indicate housing availability—per capita housing area and an index (log) of private rental rate for migrants. Approximating social networks is the number of migrants in each district during the last survey (1993), under the assumption that the more migrants already living in a district, the more will be attracted in the future. The combined influence of the five independent variables on migrant location is very strong, as indicated by a high value of R-square in Table 3.

But the results of this regression analysis are less reliable as there are only 20 districts (observations) in Shanghai. So we are hoping that, when 2000 census data are made public, we can use subdistrict demographic, socioeconomic and housing indicators to analyze and project the distribution of migrant population.