Self-Organized Urban Growth Shaped by Institutional Rules: Empirical Experiences from Beijing

Abstract

Beijing, as the capital city of China, is experiencing rapid urban growth characterised by increasing dynamics and uncertainties, which pose key challenges for contemporary planning debates. An emerging body of research addresses this issue through the lens of complexity science. This paper contributes to the debate with an empirical study of Beijing’s urban region, which has undergone massive expansion over the past thirty years. The city’s land use plan, underpinned by China’s unique land ownership system, has performed effectively in areas such as growth management and farmland preservation. However, it has also fostered the illusion that urban change can be fully controlled. Recent evidence, drawn from land use data, planning documents, and interviews with planners and developers, highlights informal land use changes and autonomous dynamics outside the plan’s framework. The study suggests that urban development is influenced by both self-organization mechanisms and institutional constraints, conceptualised here as “institutionally constrained self-organization.” This perspective challenges the notion that self-organised urban regions are entirely unpredictable and instead shows how institutional settings shape self-organised growth. The findings offer insights for reconsidering land use planning as an institutional power to determine both desired and undesirable outcomes.