本课题立足于从“城市增长机器”转向“以人为核心的新型城镇化”的转型大背景，重点关注外来人口在迁居过程中逐步融入特大城市的轨迹和机制。借用列斐伏尔、David Harvey, Edward W. Soja, 福柯等学者的空间理论，本课题将构建起能够阐释我国当下的外来人口市民化过程的空间-社会交互机制的理论解析框架。以北京为例，通过问卷和访谈等调查工具，采集外来人口的市内迁居和福利获取的阶段性和历时性的动态数据“时空迁移链”，以揭示不同社会层级、不同类型社区、不同效应机制（城市政策效应、社区邻里效应、个体家庭效应、社会资本效应等）是如何影响外来人口的空间决策与行为、及其福利获取和资本累积的。翔实的社区调研将揭示邻里效应的作用机制和主要模式，为政策制定和理论创新提供第一手资料。基于外来人口市民化过程机理的理论和实证研究，本课题将探讨有关当下制度改革的争议性问题，并进行理论创新。

China’s great transformation from “Urban Growth Machine” to “New People-Oriented Urbanization” has attracted much attention since 2012. This research will probe into the new challenges of migration control, spatial-sectoral upgrading and residency card system, and their socio-spatial impacts on the migrants in China’s first-tiered cities like Beijing. In citing the Lefebvrian discourses on the Production of Space, this program tries to construct a theoretical framework to interpret this dynamic socio-spatial process of “citizenship” among the migrants in the Chinese metropolises. Taking Beijing as a good case study, we will conduct the questionnaire survey and fieldwork on the migrants and their communities. The diachronic data on their “temporal-spatial residential mobility chain” would be collected and analyzed, to reveal how the social stratification, community diversity, and different forces (e.g. effects from policy, neighborhood, family life cycle, and social capital) have exerted their influences on the migrants’ spatial decision and behaviors, their welfare attainment and capital accumulation. The in-depth investigation on the migrants’ communities would look into the mechanism and patterns of “neighborhood effect” on the “citizenship” of Beijing’s migrants. These theoretical and empirical analysis would contribute to address some hot debates in this reformist era, and innovate the spatial theories on a more just and inclusive city.