TOWN IS/N TRANSITION

Abstract

Urbanization can be simply described as the population shift from rural to urban areas. Often in China, the process of urbanization takes place so fast that people only pay attention to the two ends of the linear process, saying the villages and the cities. Right now there are many scholar texts which focus on either discussing about the effective methods for ongoing urban developments in cities such as physical urban redevelopment and urban expansion in the case of China, or criticizing the backlashes brought by unsustainable practices, and suggesting the preservation of nature or the regeneration traditional village lifestyle. However, less attention has been put over Towns, a perhaps very transitory stage in the overall rural-urban transition. Being transitory, as I observed, not only because by China’s fast development, some towns only exists for a fleeting period of time while the cities expand or the villages redevelop, but more crucially, that physically some towns only exists as the form of transit nodes to link the city and village away from each other. As a transitional state, the town of China always stays in an uncertain situation, and its relationship with both the city and the village always remains undefined. Due to distinctive scales and contexts, neither the existing theories on urban and rural redevelopment, nor the western township model can be directly applied on the Chinese town. This dissertation aims to clarify the town’s transition, to state a town in terms of a settlement, and understand the role the town plays in the process of urbanization demarcated by city and village as two ends, assess especially the physical connectivity and metaphysical dependency of town towards city.