Demolished and Undemolished Informal Settlements in Beijing, 2017-2018

Beijing contains a dataset of 320 demolished and undemolished informal settlements compiled between 2017 and 2018. It was created by Shiqi Ma for research published in the American Journal of Political Science. The data is based on satellite imagery, digital street views, and fieldwork.

Use Cases

• Predicting demolition likelihood based on settlement illegibility to authorities.
• Spatial analysis of informal settlements using satellite imagery and street view data.
• Studying the relationship between political control and urban visual order.
• Training models to classify settlement types from geospatial and image data.

Strengths

• Dataset covers 320 specific settlements in Beijing.
• Compiled from multiple novel data sources: satellite imagery, digital street views, and fieldwork.
• Focuses on a specific two-year time range (2017-2018).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias inherent to its single-city, two-year scope.

Provenance

Source

American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) Dataverse, author Shiqi Ma.

Collection Method

Compiled from satellite imagery, digital street views, and fieldwork.

Time Range

2017-2018

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-25 03:22:41; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Beijing, China