Abstract: Urban housing price differentiation is an important issue in urban geography. Given the current high prices of housing in China, spatial variation of inner city housing prices becomes an important part of the Chinese urban geographic studies. Housing prices in China have become the focus of concern for both the government and urban residents, had significant implications for social justice and stability, improvement of living standards, enhancement of residential satisfaction and social harmony, as well as become the key issue in sustainable urbanization and the healthy development of real estate markets. Therefore, housing prices has become the core issue that is paid close attention by all levels of governments and inhabitants. The focus of this research is to examine determinants and dynamics of spatial differentiation of housing price in Yangzhou. In this paper, all types of residential areas located in Yangzhou are investigated, with the living quarters(or residential groups) taken as the basic research unit, with data in 2012. As the study included ordinary commercial housing, attached and detached houses, high-end commercial and residential apartments, housing-reform quarters, affordable houses and single-storey cottages, that is, all housing types that can be sold on the market, the result of this investigation is much more reliable compared to other studies that analyzed only ordinary commercial housing. Our appraisal system of urban housing price differentiation composed of 20 evaluation factors, four determinants and four expectation factors. The four determinants contain building(architectural) characteristics, residential quarter characteristics, location and convenience features, and landscape and environmental characteristics. The four expectation factors are displacement and resettlement, residential quarter renewal, urban spatial development strategy, and landscape and environmental renovations. Based on the evaluation and expectation factors, we calculated the scores of the four determinants in all residential groups, and analyzed their spatial differentiation patterns. Linear regression was performed between the dependent variable-housing prices of the 1305 residential quarters in Yangzhou in 2012, and the independent variables: the four determinants of price. The main influence factors of the city-wide housing market and sub-markets were evaluated by regression against housing prices. The results show that: (1) spatial patterns of the four determinants' scores are clearly different. Building characteristics and residential quarter characteristics scores show a low(center district) to high(outskirts) differentiation with concentric circles. Scores of location and convenience and landscape and environment characteristics are high in the west and center districts, and low in the east district and outskirts. (2) The key determinant of housing price is residential quarter characteristics in Yangzhou. There exist different key determinants for respective housing sub-markets. (3) The main dynamics of spatial differentiation of housing prices are as follows: locational direction on dwelling construction of particular housing types, spatial agglomeration of particular income groups, spatial inequality of investment in public commodity and locational direction on urban residential expansion and urban redevelopment. These dynamics acted on the four determinants and generated the observed spatial differentiation of housing prices in Yangzhou.

Key words: determinants, dynamics, housing price, housing sub-markets, spatial differentiation, Yangzhou