Y. Song

Lets Not Throw the Baby Out with the Bath Water: The Role of Urban Villages in Housing Rural Migrants in China

Authors: Song, Y., V. Zenou, and C. Ding
Report
Synopsis: In the era of China’s economic growth and urbanisation, providing adequate and affordable housing for rural–urban migrants in urban areas is crucial for the success of China’s multifaceted reforms. Yet the urban housing provision system has overlooked the needs of rural migrants since the reforms. Urbanising villages, a unique product of China’s urbanisation and land reform, provide affordable housing for rural migrants. However, these urbanising villages are rejected by policy-makers due to their associated social and environment problems. In this paper, a multinomial logit model of housing type choice is adopted, in which people choose from a number of mutually exclusive housing types. Regression results indicate that rural migrants are shunned by the urban housing market. It is argued that, without accompanying programmes that include rural migrants in the urban housing market, policies that focus on demolishing urbanising villages could be misguided.

 

Envisioning Beijing 2020 through Sketches of Urban Scenarios

Authors: Song, Y., C. Ding and G. Knaap
Report
Synopsis: To provide the decision-makers in Beijing, China, with an assessment of alternative development futures, we introduce scenario planning to process of drafting Beijing’s 2020 Plan. The sketches of scenarios for Beijing are fruitful in several ways. First, the development of scenarios can meet the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning (BMCUP)’s needs to explore different urban development options. Second, scenario planning can accommodate uncertainty in economic and population growth caused in part by China’s rapid social and economic transformation. Third, in the course of creating evaluation framework to assess scenarios, scenario planning informs decision-makers about choices regarding predicted outcomes. We demonstrate that in a city that is experiencing unforeseen growth in the era of transformations, the decision-making process can be informed by evaluating the performance of alternative development scenarios.