figure 1 Idealised land-bid price versus distance
wong + vasanthakumar
economic spatial trends at the rural-urban border the case of Beijing infrastructure | land value by jane wong + saeran vasanthakumar
economics land use development processes pol itics things left out
As anyone who has visited China can attest, stark poverty coexists with ostentatious displays of wealth. Such inequality makes for incongruous sights; it is not uncommon to see entire rural villages, crowded with ramshackle houses and lacking basic infrastructure, nestled incongruously in the middle of frenetic government-directed urban developments. Wherever one goes it is easy to pick out the rural migrants, invariably they are the ones shovelling snow, scavenging trash for recyclables or otherwise engaged in some menial, low-paying labour. This inequity is a reflection of the muddled systems of governance produced by an ideology compromised between communism and capitalism. This article grew over the course of a year through a series of Skype discussions from Beijing to Toronto. During this period one of us worked with a local Chinese firm while the other worked in Toronto, our first jobs after having finished our bachelor’s degrees. While the discussion began as as a way to express frustration over the state of China’s civil liberties, our purpose here is to address this cause by modelling the economic-
spatial distortions produced at the urban-rural interface, specifically as a function of China’s property right institutions. Throughout this article, we’ll be referring to figure 1 , above, an idealised model of a land-bid price versus distance graph in order to keep track of the interactions that occur along the urban-rural periphery. What we’re aiming for here is to maximise intelligibility without sacrificing the various complexities of PRC’s urban-rural trends. As such, we’re going to be a lot less formal and rigorous than the papers cited in our bibliography but will reference a fair amount of economic concepts that – rest assured – will be defined as required throughout the article. The theoretical underpinning of urban growth requires defining the fundamental role of property rights (PR) in stimulating incentives in an economic system. Value gained through any expenditure of labour is predicated on one’s ownership of its outcome, PR institutions then organises such rights in relation to the competing demands of collective coexistence. In doing so they act as the ‘meta-structure’ of urbanisation by adjudicating land- use and thus shaping the physical growth of cities.
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