Periurbanization and the politics of development-as-city-building in China

Abstract China stands out among recently urbanized societies for the planned physicality of its rural–urban transformation — the extensive marshaling of labor, capital and material resources to remake its cities and to transform rural land and communities into new, formal urban space. In China, the “rural” and the “urban” are distinguished in deeply dichotomous institutions of government, and peri-urbanization, defined as the disorderly spaces, processes and conditions of “becoming urban”, would appear to be a temporary stage of transition between an old rural socio-spatial order to a new urban socio-spatial order. The actual contested politics of development-as-urbanization suggests otherwise, however, both on a national scale and on a community scale. The definition of “development” itself is at stake, and emerges unpredictably from peri-urban experience. A view of peri-urbanization as a process of socio-ecological adaptation is better suited to societies that have evolved in long-settled, densely populated anthropogenic agrarian landscapes.