ABSTRACT
One of the most visible consequences of the market-driven social transformation is the spatial rearrangement of the patterns of people’s work and residence or the transformation of the urban human ecology. The most conspicuous of it is the rapid emergence of the communities (shequ), especially in the areas where urban expansion takes place. The Chinese urban shequ is an administrative area similar to the administrative village in rural areas in that it nominally practices self-governance but in fact falls under the overall administrative structure of the party-state. Unlike the rural villages, the urban shequ attempts to create a sense of community out of strangers and hence in some ways is comparable to the towns of the United States.
