《Uneven land reform and urban__ sprawl in China-the case of Beijing》.pdf

Progress in Planning 61 (2004) 211–236 /locate/pplann Uneven land reform and urban sprawl in China: the case of Beijing F. Frederic Deng, Youqin Huang Department of Geography and Planning, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, USA Accepted 27 October 2003 Urban sprawl has been at the center of current debate on urban structure. Compared to the rich literature on urban sprawl in Western cities, relatively little is known about whether Chinese urban expansion is excessive or inefficient. This paper provides an integrated analysis of two seemingly contradictory phenomena in China’s urban development in recent two decades, namely development zones and semi-urbanized villages, and presents Beijing as a case study. Both types of urban expansion cannot be easily explained by traditional theories of either normal suburbanization or excessive urban expansion in the West. First, Chinese local governments have set up a large number of ‘development zones’ that are often so large and discontinuous from cities, especially when considering the mass transportation mode in China, that they can best be characterized as leapfrog development at macro-level. Despite their fancy titles, the boasted impact of these development zones on the local economy is doubtful and large amount of land inside these development zones remains vacant.1 The second type of urban expansion is the expansion of urban population, especially migrant workers and temporary urban residents such as