ABSTRACT

The rural fringe of urban China is today the liminal space in fast-growing cities where the tension of development shows its more dramatic effects. Such tension is the direct consequence of the current institutional configuration of the country that stimulates the city’s appetite for unabated urban growth. This is the reason why the institutional dimension of the rural-urban fringe appears to be by far one of the most critical issues of the current urbanization of China. At the same time, the high rate of rural to urban conversion does not just imply the loss of agricultural land around the main emerging cities, but also the reshaping of peri-urban livelihoods and the alteration of a highly dense inhabited rural fringe. In this respect, the environmental concern lying behind the urban growth cannot be distinguished by broader socio-economic considerations. This is indeed a consequence of the nature of the Chinese fringe already interpreted in this book as a dense web of relations, rather than a relatively empty, open space, shaped by conflictive/cooperative actors and by a peculiar city governance system, as presented in Chapter 1.