Cultivation of the urban village

Abstract

Because of a failure to recognize the stepping-stone role of the villages for the migrants, the informally organized urban villages are not integrated into the urban structure of the municipal plan. In order to address this question the first section aims to develop a framework in order to understand and describe informal development in Shenzhen. The spatial research translates this framework into spatial language. The final section the spatial is used as the basis for a number of strategies. Informal development is not a singular development, but can be understood from different perspectives. The poverty, legal, cultural and dualistic perspective coexists next to each other. The perspectives on informality inform the main stakeholders and by their decisions they shape the development of the village. As the village transforms, so does the floating population as they become urbanites. Informal development will go through a fixed set of phases in which informal economic opportunity will firstly increase and then decrease again. the goal is to achieve an situation in which integration is optimal. Existing approaches combine different elements of informality. The Chinese approach has failed to deal with multiple aspects of informality and thus deliver a comprehensive approach to integrate informal development The informal development in Shenzhen can be viewed from different theoretical perspectives. Each perspective reveals different elements to be of importance to the inclusion of migrants and integration of the village. The informal network is historically grown under the impact of the landscape, Chinese perception of the build environment and informal growth. Through the informal growth process, an ‘interior’ space was created between different neighborhoods that act as the main urban space of the village. The ability of the informal network to include migrants differs. The integrative quality of the village can be described in terms of its embeddedness in the regional structure and the quality of the interior space. The quality of this space can be described in terms of the surrounding fabric, the edge and the functions. When the empirical data from the spatial research is applied to the theoretical framework, the villages in Guangming can be categorized in five different developmental stages. The spatial distribution of the different village types follows a logic that can be explained using the informative framework. The five village types form the basis for the regional development proposal. The current interaction between informal and formal process creates an undesirable path towards decline of informal opportunities in the villages. Based on the five village types and the historic sequence of networks, a integrative carrying structure is proposed for the region. This structure has five layers which are discussed separately. Each stage is differently located in the territory and requires different formal and informal interventions to optimize the social inclusion of the migrants.