Resilience and Circularity: Revisiting the Role of Urban Village in Rural-Urban Migration in Beijing, China

Ran Liu,Yuhang Jia

doi:10.3390/land10121284

Abstract

Recent policies in China have encouraged rural-urban circular migration and an “amphibious” and flexible status of settlement, reacting against the recent risks of economic fluctuation in cities. Rural land, as a form of insurance and welfare, can handle random hazards, and the new Land Management Law guarantees that rural migrants who settle in the city can maintain their rights to farmland, homesteads, and a collective income distribution. Existing studies have pointed out that homeland tenure can reduce migrants’ urban settlement intentions (which is a self-reported subjective perception of city life). However, little is known about how the rural-urban circularity and rural tenure system (especially for those still holding hometown lands in the countryside) affect rural migrants’ temporary urban settlements (especially for those preferring to stay in informal communities in the host city). The existing studies on the urban villages in China have focused only on the side of the receiving cities, but have rarely mentioned the other side of this process, focusing on migrants’ rural land tenure issues in their hometowns. This study discusses the rationale of informality (the urban village) and attests to whether, and to what extent, rural migrants’ retention of their hometown lands can affect their tenure security choices (urban village or not) in Chinese metropolises such as Beijing. Binary logistic regression was conducted and the data analysis proved that rural migrants who kept their hometown lands, compared to their land-loss counterparts, were more likely to live in a Beijing urban village. This displays the resilience and circularity of rural-urban migration in China, wherein the rural migrant households demonstrate the “micro-family economy”, maintaining tenure security in their hometown and avoiding the dissipation of their family income in their destination. The Discussion and Conclusions sections of this paper refer to some policy implications related to maintaining the rural-urban dual system, protecting rural migrant land rights, and beefing up the “opportunity structure” (including maintaining the low-rent areas in metropolises such as Beijing) in the 14th Five Year Plan period.

Highlights

The “urban village” has become a hot topic in relation to informal settlements in rapidly expanding metropolises in developing countries, including those in the Chinese context [1,2]
This study examines the rationale behind the informality of the urban village structure and attests to whether, and to what extent, the keeping of hometown lands by rural migrants can affect their tenure security choices in Chinese metropolises such as Beijing
According to the Migrant Dynamics Monitoring Survey (MDMS) data, 49.5% of rural migrants in Beijing had chosen to live in the urban village, especially the inner- and outer-suburban villages

Summary

Introduction

The “urban village” has become a hot topic in relation to informal settlements in rapidly expanding metropolises in developing countries, including those in the Chinese context [1,2]. The “urban village” (namely, chengzhongcun) is, in the context of land use and urban planning provisos, incompatible with official norms, and its participants suffer from substandard housing, inferior quality in the built environment, and a lack of facilities and infrastructure. The rapidly industrializing and urbanizing areas of developing countries, including those in China, are faced with similar challenges concerning the inadequate supply of public housing for migrants, such as a shortfalls in government budgets to fund public services and inequitable access to urban welfare. The urban village has been referred to as a new way to plan/build mixed-use communities in a recent literature review [3]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion