Small town urbanization in China: evidence from the land development perspective

Abstract

This paper examines land development and the consequential socio-spatial transformation in China’s small town urbanization over the past two decades. Specifically, it investigates bottom-up institutional innovation and newly emerged dynamic multi-scalar governance in small town urbanization. The research assesses how the institutional and spatial changes have reshaped local socio-economic structures and reconfigured people’s daily life in small towns. Bounded by the urban and rural dichotomy, research on China’s land use system tends to fall into two separate camps, urban and rural, leaving small towns largely neglected. In contrast to the well-investigated top-down urbanization in China’s major cities, which is primarily driven by the central government’s ambition in industrialization, the bottom-up urbanization in small towns driven by spontaneous rural industrialization has drawn considerably less scholarly attention. This research addresses this deficiency by articulating the perplexing and changing institutional settings of land acquisition and development, spatial-territorial reorganization, and their direct socio-economic influence on local economies and people’s lives.