Rural development led by autonomous village land cooperatives: Its impact on sustainable China’s urbanisation in high-density regions

Jieming Zhu and Yan Guo
Additional contact information
Jieming Zhu: Department of Urban Planning, Tongji University, China
Yan Guo: Department of Urban Planning, School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, China

Urban Studies, 2015, vol. 52, issue 8, 1395-1413

Abstract: As a main rural initiative, village land shareholding cooperatives spearhead non-agricultural development in the interest of rural communities, and thus participate in urbanisation. Nanhai, Guangdong, is a case in illustration. The institution of land shareholding cooperatives gives rise to unique compartmentalised industrialisation and fragmented urbanisation in the context of high population density and small-area autonomous villages. Village cooperatives are mutated from economic corporations to welfare organisations, prompted by the collapse of village enterprises. Being averse to investment for long-term productivity, village cooperatives indulge in extracting short-term land rents solely. Extracting land economic rents created by urbanisation, village cooperatives generate environmental and social equality problems. High-density low-income countries, especially in Asia, are facing a great challenge as fierce competition for limited urban land resources without effective governance often results in an unfavourable form of urbanisation. Sustainable compact urbanisation needs to strike a balance between local autonomy and urban integrity.

Keywords: built environment; China; high-density regions; institution; land cooperatives; sustainable urbanisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098014534736 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:52:y:2015:i:8:p:1395-1413

DOI: 10.1177/0042098014534736

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().