Abstract: Sociology is to give enough attention to living differentiation in the social transformation period. The paper, taking Guangzhou as an example, investigates the history of differentiation of the urban living space since the founding of New China, and concludes that polarization will appear if living differentiation is not controlled. The nature of polarization of urban living space manifests social unfairness and unjustness through living space. The paper proposes optimizing the urban living space structure from four aspects: to enlarge midincome population size, to increase the power of social selforganization; to make just social policy; and to supervising the healthy development of real estate.

Key words: differentiation, polarization, living space