The fate of Chinese urban villages (chengzhongcun) has recently attracted both research and policy attention. Two important unaddressed questions are: what are the sources of informality in otherwise orderly Chinese cities; and, will village redevelopment policy eliminate informality in the...

Within the process of urban expansion through land requisition in China, farmers' de facto rights to collective land, including farmland and housing plots (zhaijidi), are forcibly acquired by the state and thereafter redistributed to private developers, to facilitate urban-based economic growth....

This paper aims to understand the formation of poor neighbourhoods through examining the transformation of a suburban industrial district into a poverty neighbourhood in the city of Nanjing. The notion of a poverty of transition is developed to show how such a transformation occurs in the...

The spatial distribution and locational characteristics of land development have changed dramatically in Chinese cities since the land reform of 1987 which allowed the paid transfer of land-use rights—i.e. land leasing. This has led to the rapid transformation of the urban spatial...

Housing provision in a socialist country is generally characterised by the dominance of public housing. However, provision of public housing is a complicated process, which involves various social agencies. In the case of China, the simple notion of 'state provision' covers huge differences...

This study considers recent changes in the built environment of Chinese metropolitan areas during the transition from a planned to a market economy. Implications of this transition include changes in the political economy (increasing localisation, diversification of investment and the growth of...

China's changing urban development processes and urban landscapes in the transition towards a more market-oriented economy have received extensive research attention in recent years. Relatively, the governing of Chinese cities is still underresearched. This article aims to analyse the forces...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is now becoming a driving force for world-wide urban structuring. Very few studies have been made at the intrametropolitan scale of industrial location in post-socialist cities. Studies at a regional scale have generally emphasised the 'peculiar' nature of FDI and...

Shanghai, the largest socialist industrial city in China, is now experiencing dramatic restructuring under global and local forces. This paper provides a preliminary account of remaking this city into a world city. The case study suggests the tremendous and pervasive impact of globalisation on...

Modern computational techniques offer new horizons for urban economics in the form of agent-based simulation frameworks. This paper reports on a cellular automata (CA) simulation in which urban land transforms on the basis of locally optimal bargaining between developers and local communities...