Retain or Rebuild: Different Pathways of Redevelopment in Urbanising Chinese Villages

Abstract

While the ongoing rapid urbanisation in China transforms farmland into urban areas, old villages receive a certain level of protection from being completely rebuilt. This is due to the grassroots ownership of rural land, which is held by village collectives. The village becomes surrounded by the city, called chengzhongcun. During this intense transformation from an agricultural to a landless way of life, the village collectives redevelop their dense settlement in very different ways to create resilience and benefit from the opportunities that urbanisation brings. This research is examining four old villages in the Huangyan-Taizhou region during their redevelopment. It will be analysed how different stakeholder decisions create variations in their urban form and how this influences their economic resilience. Employing methods from the space syntax framework coupled with land use mapping and interviews, this research builds on Hillier’s concept of the movement economy. Hillier finds that urban form generates movement, which then becomes the precursor for street-based economic activities such as retail and services. This relates to Vaughan’s and Hall’s work on ethnic marketplaces which identifies informal economic networks as key social safety nets of low-income and migrant neighbourhoods. The findings suggest that villages that have seen bottom-up incremental changes and retained their organic street network generate higher movement than rebuilt villages and thus are able to shift their economies towards the service sector. Their building stock is also more adaptable to ground-floor subdivisions and retail use, while redeveloped villages often have set-back buildings with residential ground floors that cannot facilitate informal use or retail space. Since the former farmland surrounding the villages is developed into industrial land, the villages are the only possible site for restaurants, shops and other amenities, creating many opportunities for villagers. They can be however only realised with specific pathways of redevelopment.