wong + vasanthakumar
Luxury high-rise construction and the remains of a neighbouring semi-formal village by Beijing’s 5th Ring road where one of the authors lived and worked.
bibliography ‘A work in progress’. The Economist (17. May 2011): Web. 25. Jan 2012 Deng, F Frederic and Huang, Youqin. ‘Uneven land reform and urban sprawl in China: the case of Beijing’. Progress in Planning 61 (2004): 211-236 Ding, Chengri. ‘Urban Spatial Development in China’s Pro-Land Policy Reform Era: Evidence from Beijing’. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Working Paper (2003): 1-32 Naughton, Lewis. The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth . Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007 Po, Lanchih. ‘Redefining Rural Collectives in China: Land Conversion and the Emergence of Rural Shareholding Co-operatives’. Urban Studies 45(8) (2008): 1603-1623 ‘Where do you live?’ The Economist (23. Jun 2011): Web. 25. Jan 2012 Xun, Li, Xianxiang, Xu and Li Zhigang. ‘Land Property Rights and Urbanization in China’. The China Review (2010):11-38 Definitions from www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary The most effective policy reform would be the implementation of a property tax or development impact fee that would allow local governments to extract revenue without directly controlling development process. 8 With access to a continuous source of revenue, officials could also be convinced to allow rural peasants to sell their own land and thus have access to residuals themselves. Combined with a market for rural derivatives (already being tested in the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing) it could re- equilibrate economic-spatial interaction through the emergence of a decentralised system of resource allocation. –
By unpacking them, we suggest an alternative way to read cities and their rural peripheries: specifically their property institutions can be understood as the conceptual matrix that shapes specific modalities of land use. This in turn provides a way to abstract and derive the policy reforms that enable productive, robust and just societies. Which is how we’ll conclude the article. There have been in fact numerous local attempts and experiments at mitigating the problems caused by the dual-institutional PR regime 7 – however, large scale reform has largely been resisted for a number of reasons: land residuals remain the only way to finance necessary urban development, there is a fear that landlessness creates destitute poverty, there is a lack of social and physical infrastructure to accommodate increased urban migration, the government’s instinct is to preserve stability at all costs, and traces of socialist ideology remains, even today, wary of privatisation. 7a
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7, 7a Lanchih Po, p 1603 and ‘Where’, The Economist 8 Deng and Huang, p232
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