关键词: 城市化, 城乡边界, 领域化, 去（再）领域化, 城乡治理

Abstract:

Territorialization is a key theoretical concept in political geography. In this paper, the authors adopt the perspective of territorialization and re(de)-territorialization to analyze the urbanization in China. In the process of urbanization, the limitation on urban development is resolved by the territorial expansion, in which the city expropriates more land for development and the ‘non-urban’ area is absorbed into ‘urban’ area. The actors in different scales, including the local government and central government, adopt different strategies of re-territorialization and de-territorialization. Based on the diachronic analysis of a case of an urbanizing village in Guangzhou, the paper summarizes three levels of territorialization of urbanization in China: First, the territorialization of urbanization is on space level. The land is the basic element in urbanizing process. The urban state and the peasants held the same recognition on land ownership that the land belongs to the state. The state and the city, based on the land rules and the needs of urban development, transfer the rural land to urban area. In this process, the rural area is absorbed into urban area, and the urban and rural space is re-adjusted. In the meantime, the administrative institution is transferred from rural system to urban system, from village to community. The second level is on the territorialization and de-territorialization of the space for interests. With their own strategies, multiple actors - local government, companies, village committee and villagers - enter the space for interests, negotiating and bargaining for their respective benefits. Different actors adopt different discourses in order to acquire more benefits. The urban state expropriates the rural land in order to develop economy. From the viewpoint of peasants and the collective, they benefited from the land expropriation, but lost the stable benefits of land in the end. As the economy develops, the peasants hope to obtain sustainable benefit. The third level is about place identity, where the competing strategies of re-territorialization lead to the generation and transition of place identity. The urban sprawl brings changes to the villages as well as the villagers. The communities finally get into the bottom layer of the urban administrative structure. The inconformity in these three levels causes discrepancies in governance at various times and further leads to the dilemma of governance. From the the perspective of territorialization, the paper discusses how the political scale is emerging from and reflected by the process of urbanization. After a review of the transitions of the boundaries between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ areas in different periods, the complicated process of self-adjustment of the village, and the governance dilemma in the integration of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ areas, the paper gives some advice.

Key words: urbanization, the boundaries of urban and rural areas, territorialization, de-territorialization, governance