Transportation and Metropolitan Development in China’s Pearl River Delta: The Experience of Panyu

Abstract

The role played by transportation in the process of metropolitan development has long received scholarly attention. Recent studies of rapid urbanization in major metropolitan regions in Asian countries have raised important questions concerning the interrelationship between improved transport infrastructure and settlement transition. This study investigates economic and spatial transformation in a suburban county of China’s Pearl River Delta. Heavy investment in the transport sector has characterized the development strategy adopted by local economic planners since economic reforms. Planning and development of a modern transportation system have created a transactional environment conducive to settlement transition, land use transformation, and environmental change. Transport development in the delta region has been primarily planned and financed by local governments. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of socialist development, the central state did not play any active role in either planning or funding for transport improvement. With its locational focus in the suburb where land could be claimed more easily than in the city, transport development has significantly contributed to the formation of a distinct extended metropolitan region characterized by intensified rural–urban interaction, great mobility of population, rapid transformation of land, growing mixture of urban/rural activities, and commercial development in nodal and ribbon forms.