ABSTRACT

In the past three decades, urbanization has changed China’s spatial and social landscape dramatically. Urban policies discriminate against rural migrants and exclude them from various amenities including subsidized housing. The lack of attention to the spatial evolution of urban villages hinders our understanding of their dynamics and diverse nature, and in so doing perhaps misleads the pursuit of sustainable urban village policies. Rapid urban development since 1979 has created 320 urban villages spread over the entire city. Urban villages follow the same general development path but each has a specific development phase at any moment in time; their overall growth was neither uniform across the city nor stable through 1999-2009.