The role of informal ruralization within China’s rapid urbanization

Abstract

In China’s rapidly urbanizing cities, chengshi kaihuang (CK), an informal practice of urban agriculture, has been quietly encroaching into neglected urban spaces for the cultivation of vegetables. China’s unprecedented transformation from an agrarian nation to a nation of megacities over the past four decades has relied massively upon the incorporation of rural land and people in the construction and operation of its cities. Yet, while some scholars have begun to unpack the complex agency of rural bodies in China’s urban environments, the rural is generally understood to be residual or obsolete against the overwhelming, top-down power of urbanization. Here we propose, through a remote sensing study of the practice, CK as an example of the bottom-up, ruralizing agency of ordinary people within China’s rapid urbanization and present data on the spatial impact of CK’s ruralization upon the central urban districts of Wuhan, a Chinese megacity.