Metropolitan development in a transitional socialist economy: Spatial restructuring in the Pearl River Delta, China

Abstract

The dynamic of globalisation and urban change in Europe and North America has been extensively documented. Relatively little is known about the processes and consequences of spatial restructuring in metropolitan regions within the context of a transitional socialist economy. This study investigates economic restructuring and spatial transformation in one of the most dynamic metropolitan regions in China. Deregulation of the post-reform socialist central state has allowed Chinese peasants to diversify agricultural production and to industrialise the rural economy according to various personal strengths and the changing market demand. Despite the rapid commercialisation and industrialisation of the regional economy, there has been no growing concentration of population and production facilities in large cities. The loci of accelerated economic growth, increased population mobility and massive land-use transformation have been in the intermediate zones surrounding and between metropolitan centres. Rapid expansion of the extended metropolitan zone has been driven primarily by forces of rural industrialisation at the grassroots level rather than a result of urban sprawl. The on-going processes and evolving patterns of 'urban-rural integration' (chengxiang yitifa) in Chinese extended metropolitan regions demonstrate the complexity of the relationship between industrialisation and urbanisation in different political economies and question the adequacy of the widely accepted urban-rural dichotomy. The intrusion of global forces has not homogenised local particularities. Global capitalism has to seek shelter from locally specific conditions in order to take root in socialist soil.