Uneven land reform and urban sprawl in China: the case of Beijing

Urban sprawl has been at the center of current debate on urban structure. Compared to the rich literature on urban sprawl in Western cities, relatively little is known about whether Chinese urban expansion is excessive or inefficient. This paper provides an integrated analysis of two seemingly contradictory phenomena in China’s urban development in recent two decades, namely development zones and semi-urbanized villages, and presents Beijing as a case study. Both types of urban expansion cannot be easily explained by traditional theories of either normal suburbanization or excessive urban expansion in the West. First, Chinese local governments have set up a large number of ‘development zones’ that are often so large and discontinuous from cities, especially when considering the mass transportation mode in China, that they can best be characterized as leapfrog development at macro-level. Despite their fancy titles, the boasted impact of these development zones on the local economy is doubtful and large amount of land inside these development zones remains vacant. The second type of urban expansion is the expansion of urban population, especially migrant workers and temporary urban residents such as students, and accompanying ‘illegal’ construction into rural villages on the urban fringe that gradually become ghetto-like, sprawling migrant enclaves. While these places still physically look like rural villages and lack urban infrastructure and services, most of their residents work in cities and have an urban lifestyle. Population growth in these villages is not accommodated by new development but rather by crowding of