Public Space Planning in Urban Resettlement Community in China: Addressing Diverse Needs of Rural Migrants through Function Programming Based on Architectural Planning Theory

Abstract

Rural migrants, who are widespread in China, experience diverse production and living needs upon resettlement in towns because of their various population attributes. However, the planning of resettlement community public spaces solely follows urban community function programming, which is misaligned with rural migrants’ needs, leading to a conflict between migrants and community regulation. Under the architectural planning theory and founded on previous research about rural migrants’ needs by the authors, this study involves expanded research that explores an approach to transforming migrants’ needs into resettlement community public space function programming. This approach includes three steps: (1) judging the dividing line between high and low levels of migrants’ needs, (2) extracting “Basic–Expansion–Potential” function item sets from the permutation and combination of different migrant types, and (3) calibrating function item sets with the current national architecture standard. In addition, this study compared the transformed data results with the need characteristics of migrants to inspect the rationality of the research method, formed two types of resettlement community public space function programming, namely “medium-high” and “medium-low” urbanization resettlement communities, and proposed elastic design strategies to respond to the complex functional programming. This research will provide a theoretical reference for the planning and construction of such resettlement spaces in China as well as other countries with the same migration and resettlement situation.