scholarly journals Urban Villages, Their Redevelopment and Implications for Inequality and Integration

2021 ◽  
pp. 99-120
Author(s):  
Ya Ping Wang

AbstractUrbanvillages are a unique product of China’s rapid urban expansion. They provide a new way of life sustained by property rental income for local villagers. More importantly, urban villages provide cheap accommodation for millions of rural migrant workers in most large cities. Recently, with the increasing demand for land by commercialdevelopers and public projects, urban villages have become the targets for redevelopment. This chapter uses a case study village in Beijing as an example to assess the social and economic impacts of urban village redevelopment on both the original local inhabitants and migrants in rented accommodation. The case study village went through a very long and complicated redevelopment process from 2004 to 2017 involving different stages of demolition and relocation. It provided a rare opportunity to evaluate the effects on the local population, both pre- and post-redevelopment. The study involved several field visits, observation and interviews with village residents. It shows that urban village redevelopment offered no positive benefits for migrant workers who often lost their homes to demolition. For local villagers, redevelopment and relocation into new flats may improve their living conditions. However, most suffer from the loss of long-term economic and income generation opportunities. Moreover, the new property rights for the replacement flats confer no additional rights of citizenship for the relocated villagers who remain ‘second-class citizens’ within Chinese cities.

Urban Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Gao ◽  
Sina Shahab ◽  
Negar Ahmadpoor

Urban villages play an important role in providing affordable housing to urban migrants in Chinese cities. They are considered as supplementary to the dual rural-urban system in China. Of central importance to studying urban villages is how the morphology of these informal settlements affects urban life. It is essential for urban planners and designers to examine the morphology of urban villages. This paper, therefore, investigates the morphology of urban villages using the case study of Dayuan Village in Guangzhou, China. The morphology of this urban village is tested against four main elements of urban morphology: urban density, accessibility, functional mix, and urban interface. Our results revealed that the type of street within the urban village has considerable influence on accessibility, functional mix, and urban interface. Regarding urban density, our results show that buildings’ height is not influenced by the centrality of buildings nor land value; however, it is likely that it is affected by planning agreements between the village committee and the local government. Land coverage does not comply with the planning regulation for residential districts. Regarding accessibility analysis, the number of entrances to streets is influenced by the type of street under analysis. The distribution of different types of functional mix is also affected by the type of street within the urban village. The buildings with a mix of ‘live/visit’ are concentrated along the formal streets and primary inner streets. The mono-functional use of ‘live’ and the bi-functional mix of ‘live/work’ are mostly located in the secondary inner streets. Regarding urban interface, our results demonstrate that the formal streets have an interface with considerable porosity, and that this can contribute to the livelihood of the immediate area.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-85
Author(s):  
Giulianne Joyce da Silva ◽  
Mariani dos Passos Borges ◽  
José Alves Rodrigues

In view of the increase in population and the need for housing, natural and / or preservation areas are being replaced by large cities. It was analyzed about the suppression of natural environments, such as the loss of a parcel of mangrove that occurred to originate the Maria Ortiz neighborhood — Vitória / ES. In order to observe and quantify such losses, verify if such action continues to happen and the scenario of the time for the population to accomplish this feat. Therefore, it was necessary to survey historical data from the region under study and documentary research in georeferenced images from different decades for comparison purposes. Then, a case study was carried out based on the content of the materials obtained. In view of this, it appears that when comparing the images, a very significant loss of mangrove area over the decades and an accelerated evolution of the Maria Ortiz neighborhood regarding urban expansion, thus realizing that the neighborhood emerged from the extinction of a parcel area protected by law.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xizan Jin ◽  
Tianzhou Ren ◽  
Nuannuan Mao ◽  
Lili Chen

As a vital source of the demographic dividend, migrant workers living in urban villages have positively contributed to urban economic development and the improvement of urbanization. Although urban villages have had a great impact on public health due to the shabby environments and poor public safety, the large-scale demolition of the urban villages, the supply of affordable housing for migrant workers has decreased drastically, which may lead to the outflow of many migrant workers and consequently affects the sustainable operations of cities. Therefore, this paper takes Hangzhou as an example to study the impact of urban village redevelopment on migrant workers and their migration decisions during urban village redevelopment process. The finding indicates that migrant workers are significantly impacted by large-scale demolition. (1) The number of affected migrant workers is huge. For example, 657,000 migrant workers who lived in around 178 urban villages are affected in Hangzhou (34,468 households). (2) The increase in rent is obvious. (3) Strong expulsion effect: nearly 1/3 migrant workers will decide to leave the city because of the demolition. Furthermore, our binary logistic regression model suggests that the commuting time, living satisfactory, and the rent affordability are factors significantly affecting migration workers' decision to leave and stay in the city. The housing quality and comfort indicators are not significant. This indicates that convenience for employment and high rent avoidance are the major characteristics of migrant workers' housing choice. Hence, in addition to considering whether the harsh environment is harmful to the public health of urban and residents, the interest and characteristics of migrant workers should be considered during the current urban village demolition process. While simply demolishing urban villages, government needs to provide a relatively sufficient amount of low-cost and affordable housing for migrant workers in case migrant workers leave the city in large numbers due to lack of suitable housing in the city.


10.1596/31939 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuko Okazawa ◽  
Nozomi Murakami
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Andrew Bednarski ◽  
Gemma Tully

Epigraphers and archaeologists working in Egypt must navigate a host of complex relationships both on and off site. This chapter explores the multifaceted nature of local Egyptian peoples’ relationships with nearby monuments through the lens of a single case study: the site of Sheikh Abd al-Qurna and its local population, the Qurnawi. Egyptologists have not traditionally sought to incorporate formally the stories and histories of local populations in their studies of pharaonic sites. An increasing blend of social awareness and the desire for social action on the part of both foreign professionals and local activists, however, is pushing Egyptologists to re-evaluate their practices, which, in turn, is moving the discipline in new and positive directions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8490
Author(s):  
Hongjie Peng ◽  
Lei Hua ◽  
Xuesong Zhang ◽  
Xuying Yuan ◽  
Jianhao Li

In recent years, ecosystem service values (ESV) have attracted much attention. However, studies that use ecological sensitivity methods as a basis for predicting future urban expansion and thus analyzing spatial-temporal change of ESV are scarce in the region. In this study, we used the CA-Markov model to predict the 2030 urban expansion under ecological sensitivity in the Three Gorges reservoir area based on multi-source data, estimations of ESV from 2000 to 2018 and predictions of ESV losses from 2018 to 2030. Research results: (i) In the concept of green development, the ecological sensitive zone has been identified in Three Gorges reservoir area; it accounts for about 35.86% of the study area. (ii) It is predicted that the 2030 urban land will reach 211,412.51 ha by overlaying the ecological sensitive zone. (iii) The total ESV of Three Gorges Reservoir area showed an increasing trend from 2000 to 2018 with growth values of about USD 3644.26 million, but the ESVs of 16 districts were decreasing, with Dadukou and Jiangbei having the highest reductions. (iv) New urban land increases by 80,026.02 ha from 2018 to 2030. The overall ESV losses are about USD 268.75 million. Jiulongpo, Banan and Shapingba had the highest ESV losses.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 525
Author(s):  
Yann Forget ◽  
Michal Shimoni ◽  
Marius Gilbert ◽  
Catherine Linard

By 2050, half of the net increase in the world’s population is expected to reside in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), driving high urbanization rates and drastic land cover changes. However, the data-scarce environment of SSA limits our understanding of the urban dynamics in the region. In this context, Earth Observation (EO) is an opportunity to gather accurate and up-to-date spatial information on urban extents. During the last decade, the adoption of open-access policies by major EO programs (CBERS, Landsat, Sentinel) has allowed the production of several global high resolution (10–30 m) maps of human settlements. However, mapping accuracies in SSA are usually lower, limited by the lack of reference datasets to support the training and the validation of the classification models. Here we propose a mapping approach based on multi-sensor satellite imagery (Landsat, Sentinel-1, Envisat, ERS) and volunteered geographic information (OpenStreetMap) to solve the challenges of urban remote sensing in SSA. The proposed mapping approach is assessed in 17 case studies for an average F1-score of 0.93, and applied in 45 urban areas of SSA to produce a dataset of urban expansion from 1995 to 2015. Across the case studies, built-up areas averaged a compound annual growth rate of 5.5% between 1995 and 2015. The comparison with local population dynamics reveals the heterogeneity of urban dynamics in SSA. Overall, population densities in built-up areas are decreasing. However, the impact of population growth on urban expansion differs depending on the size of the urban area and its income class.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 2478
Author(s):  
Tyler Stumpf ◽  
Daniel P. Bigman ◽  
Dominic J. Day

Fort Stanwix National Monument, located in Rome, NY, is a historic park with a complex use history dating back to the early Colonial period and through the urban expansion and recent economic revitalization of the City of Rome. The goal of this study was to conduct a GPR investigation over an area approximately 1 acre in size to identify buried historic features (particularly buildings) so park management can preserve these resources and develop appropriate educational programming and management plans. The GPR recorded reflection events consistent with our expectations of historic structures. Differences in size, shape, orientation, and depth suggest that these responses likely date to different time periods in the site’s history. The GPR recorded other reflection anomalies that are difficult to interpret without any additional information, which suggests that pairing high-density geophysical data with limited excavations is critical to elaborate a complex site’s intricate history.


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