Tag Archives: urbanisation

Redefining urban: a new way to measure metropolitan areas

Report published by the OECD, 2012, 148 p.

This report compares urbanisation trends in OECD countries on the basis of a newly defined OECD methodology which helps cross-country comparison of the socio-economic and environmental performance of metropolitan areas in OECD countries.

The methodology is presented and results from its application to 28 OECD countries are discussed together with policy implication both on national growth and governance of cities.
The report also includes three original papers that present the urbanisation dynamics and prospects in China and South Africa and the governance challenges resulting from the new policy agenda on cities in the United Kingdom.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter 1. Redefining urban areas in OECD countries
  • Chapter 2. Urbanisation and migration trends in South Africa: theory and policy implications
  • Chapter 3. Urbanisation in China today
  • Chapter 4.  Focusing on functionality: changing approached to economic development in England
Free preview. The full version is accessible to subscribers on the OECD iLibrary or can be purchased from the OECD Online Bookshop
Get this report: online version paperback

Jacqueline Nivard

Jacqueline Nivard, Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

More Posts - Website

China needs land reform for efficient of urbanization: Wu Jinglian

China’s urbanization has been inefficient as a result of an unhealthy real estate system, according to Wu Jinglian, a leading economist speaking in China’s Economy Development Innovation Forum in Shanghai.

Tags:

Monique Abud

Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine, EHESS, Paris, France

More Posts

Ni Pengfei 倪鹏飞, The characteristics, problems and policy recommendations about China’s urbanisation

Professor Ni Pengfei 倪鹏飞.  recently published an article in Zhongguo guoqing guoli1

Urbanisation is an important process, which promotes national economic and social development. It is also an important development strategy for China’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015). The authors highlight several features of Chinese urbanisation, and point out the main problems confronting it; they then make policy recommendations for the development of China’s urbanisation.

Basing their calculations on the data gathered during the 2010 census, the authors predict that during the “12th Five-Year ” period, China’s urban population will surpass its rural population. The level of urbanisation in the future will not be greatly improved with merely a stable growth rate of 1%. As for the population flow in China, the population of small cities is moving to medium-sized cities while the population of medium-sized cities is moving to large cities. Population movement has sped up more dramatically than it ever has before. As a result of pollution caused by urbanisation, the construction of transportation networks that rely on energy from green sources (renewable energy) has become the growing trend.

In the process of urbanisation, the problems the Chinese government faces include census registration problems, social welfare and unemployment after a change of residence from rural to state-owned urban land. This problem arises from the differences which exist between state-owned land and land owned collectively by farmers under the Chinese land ownership system. In addition, registration of families, with or without farms, is defined by the Chinese family registration system. However, when land owned by farmers is converted to state property, the farmers who originally lived in the rural area are forced to immigrate to the city. In China, transference of the family registration is strictly forbidden. The farmers’ registration cannot be easily transferred to the status of “urban family”. This limits population mobility and restricts freedom of migration between cities, which in turn influences issues such as rural housing, free medical treatment, and social insurance. The problem is caused by the delay of the census registration for the farmers, which bars them from their right to social welfare benefits. At the same time, there is also the problem the construction of urban public facilities. The authors have taken Beijing city as an example: the city is flooded whenever there is heavy rain. This is due to the poor design of the drainage system. And there are other problems of environmental pollution caused by urbanisation as well.

The authors make further recommendations for the development of China’s urbanisation. They suggest solving the problem of the census registration of farmers’ families. They recommended that the government accept farmers who have a stable job and have been living a fixed number of years in the city as urban citizens. They also suggest creating a series of schemes that can help the farmers with land acquisition and compensation, as well as provide social security and employment services to prevent them from losing both their jobs and their identity when they lose their land. The authors also recommended that during the urbanisation process, the policy should strictly control heavily polluting industries, and should then develop a low-carbon economy to protect the ecological environment.

 

  1. Zhao Zheng 赵峥, Ni Pengfei 倪鹏飞, “Dangqian wo guo chengzhen hua fazhan de tezheng, wenti ji zhengce jianyi”  当前我国城镇化发展的特征、问题及政策建议, Zhongguo guoqing guoli  2012, 2. Full text available on CNKI []

Chi-Han Ai

Ph.D. candidate of EHESS ( École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris) focusing on regional economic development in China and Taiwan.

More Posts

Call for papers: international comparative analysis of poverty in Asia: urbanization, migration and social policy

Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU) and the Institute for Poverty Alleviation and International Development (IPAID) are jointly organizing a symposium in October 2012 on the effects of urbanization and poverty alleviation in Asia. The main purpose is to address the widening income gap between rural and urban areas in Asia in the past thirty years.

Development scholars, researchers, and practitioners are invited to submit high-quality papers with a focus on the symposium theme of urbanization and migration in Asia and its affect on poverty in both rural and urban areas. The symposium aims to create a dialogue among scholars of Asian development studies to address effective urban and rural poverty reduction strategies.

The symposium will focus on the following set of issues which include (but are not limited to):
Rural development and urbanization in Asia
International standards of poverty alleviation
Access to land and land right education (rights, inequity, and poverty)
Labor mobility and poverty
Gender based income inequality
Social policy to tackle poverty and inequality
Housing, transportation and infrastructure development
National policies and measures for the eradication of poverty

The symposium will conclude with an excursion to disaster areas in Chengdu affected by the 2008 earthquake which killed an estimated 69,000 people. SWJTU has taken a lead in the recovery efforts and research cooperation in the field of poverty alleviation in Western China’s less developed areas.

Selected papers from the symposium will be published in a special edited volume of the Journal of Poverty Alleviation and International Development (JPAID) in 2013.

Submission Deadlines

Submission of a 500 word abstract is due by September 15, 2012. If accepted, SWJTU will communicate with you in September to submit a full paper (6000-8000 words). Deadline for submission of full paper is October 15, 2012.

All participants will be provided with accommodations and meals at Southwest Jiatong University for the duration of the symposium. Participants are responsible for their own travel to attend the symposium.

For more information regarding the symposium, please contact:
The Institute for Poverty Alleviation and International Development
Yonsei University at Wonju
1 Yonseidae-gil
Wonju, Gangwon-do, Korea 220-710
Email: ipaid@yonsei.ac.kr

*****************
Southwest Jiatong University was founded in 1896. As a nationally renowned university located in Chengdu, SWJTU has conducted a number of comprehensive research projects on this topic. China in the previous two years has selected Southwestern Chongqing and Chengdu as pilot reform cities targeting coordinated rural and urban development through reforms in all sectors. The final aim of coordinated rural and urban development is to eliminate poverty and give rural farmers and migrant workers the ability to enjoy the same rights, public services and living conditions as urban residents do. The two pilot cities have pledged to carry out reforms in such areas as household registration systems, land management, social security and government administration. Website: http://www.swjtu.edu.cn

The Institute for Poverty Alleviation and International Development (IPAID) at Yonsei University, Wonju campus was established in 2010, as a university-wide research institution. The goal of IPAID is to alleviate poverty and promote sustainable international development through various domestic and international collaborations and comprehensive research on regional and global poverty reduction. Website: http://ipaid.yonsei.ac.kr
Update date 2012.08.16 15:36

The rapid march towards urbanisation

Posted by Kate Mackenzie on Aug 30 14:09.

In our first post in this series, we examined the widely-held belief that China’s steel demand will continue to rise at a rapid rate. FT Alphaville, along with others, contend that such forecasts are on shaky ground. This is, in part, because of the dubiousness of one of the underlying assumptions: that China will rapidly urbanise more of its population. (Here’s a very recent example of this argument, from Stephen Roach.)

The proportion Chinese living in urban areas just passed the 50 per cent mark in the past year but, the story goes, there is more to come. This will in turn mean more industrialisation, more modernisation, a bigger and consuming middle class and of course more GDP growth. In other words:

[…] farmers who once led simple, subsistence-level lives now become factory and service workers in the city, reside in apartments furnished with appliances, occasionally eat out, and perhaps even send their kids to college. In the process, self-sufficient rural households are transformed into workers receiving higher wages and participating in the commodity economy of consumption. As such, urbanization is as much an economic and social transformation as it is a spatial and demographic process.

Sounds great doesn’t it?

The above quote however comes from a paper by Kam Wing Chan in Eurasian Geography and Economics early this year. Chan is a professor of geography at the University of Washington, and he doesn’t agree that this is how things will continue to play out for China.

Tags: