Rural Transition In Xi'an Suburbs Based On Space And Function Perspectives

Since China opened to the outside world,the urbanization has been moving on a fast pace.As an urban and rural transition area closely connected with the city,suburb serves cities as its main functions.With the rapid expansion of city size and the city land spread,its function intention and spatial scope are also changing.The transition of suburbs determines the complexity and diversity in the suburban development,making it possible to develop spaces as carriers for implementing multiple macro-strategies,for example,balancing urban and rural development,advancing new urbanization and guaranteeing food security,etc.On this ground,suburb functions and its spaces may evolve complexly.A right grasp of its evolution law will help guide urban and rural development,coordinate layouts of the three functions,i.e.production,living and ecology,and improve the sustainable development of cities.In view of this,this paper builds an analytical framework with two scales,“region-village domain” based on the suburban function intentions and spatial evolution features and its process mechanism.On this basis,following the paradigm of “concept-feature-mechanismmode”,we focus on the suburban function transition characterized by land use transformation in the suburbs of big cities,for example,Xi'an.Surveying rural transition about some characteristics on the macro and micro scales in the suburbs of Xi'an since the open door policy,and analyzing the leading factors influencing the rural suburb transition and its function mechanism,a suburb transition model is hereby proposed.Here major conclusions are drawn as follows:1.With the city development and the change in city's demand for suburbs,the spatial extent and functional structure in the suburbs are constantly evolving,and various function spaces are also displaced.As a general character,the evolution of suburb land use pattern is to transform rural land(agricultural and forestry lands and village construction land)to urban construction land with increase and decrease coordinated.It has been reflected in multiple ways,such as the change in functional land area,the escalation of land intensification and the ripple expanded displacement of space circle-layer.During the period,the service capacities and values of the four functions,i.e.agricultural production,industrial production,living facilities and ecological services have been improved continuously.Among them,the agricultural production function has been changed from grain and vegetable base to the one integrated with fruit,vegetable and grain products;the industrial production function hasbeen degraded in the rural economy,but the components of life and ecological service functions have become increasingly abundant.The functional space for agricultural production forms a distribution pattern of “circle + plate”.There is an evident spatialization and scale of industrial production function spaces,and the ecological service function space presents an integrated feature based on specialization and ubiquity.Life function space transforms from rural to city styles and the closer to the city,the more distinct it is.Dominant functions of suburbs have undergone the “agricultural production-industrial productionecological services” transformation.The evolution of suburban functions may attribute to the expansion of central urban spaces and functions,and continuous upgrading of urban development demands.2.Survey from basic units that constitute the suburb,that is,the village domains,in addition to overall feature as aforementioned,in the evolution of suburb functions and spaces,it has also formed different function types due to the disparities in traffic location and resource endowments between villages.Suburb villages form village functions as tourism and leisure or rural industry depending on good transport and location conditions,and there are multiple economies(such as agritainment,cultural tourism,carton processing,and furniture manufacture)emerged thanks to distinct village itself and abundant surrounding resources;the outer suburb village is dominated by agricultural production,but some depend on surrounding resorts,cultural relics and other natural and human resources to develop rural tourism,thus forming a leisure service function.The villages with different types of functions match land utilization and farmer income structures,but the social relationship between micro villages has not significantly differentiated subject to the changes in function and income structures.3.The functional and spatial evolution in the suburbs in big cities is attributed to the coefficient result with space use control under planning policy regulation and effective allocation of resources under the market mechanism,as “path creation” realized under the mechanism of “internal and external mutual feedback”.In this process,the change in suburb functions leads to spatial response to driving the evolution of functional spaces.Among them,the ecological service function of the suburbs emerges day by day.It is required to lead the functional space layout following the ecological land rent theory.The “internal and external mutual feedback” mechanism includes the “internal and external interaction” mechanism between various factors influencing suburb transition dominated by external power and the “function feedback” mechanism between suburb “region-villages”.Among them,the former refers to the "top-down" recombination function,that is,under the external power,the "local condition-external environment" elements integrate to change the interaction between urban and rural areas to trigger the evolution of suburban village spaces and its characterized functions.Various factors play different roles in the process of suburb transition;the function feedback mechanism means that the above-mentioned external factors change the composition of development elements in the villages with different traffic location and resource endowments,further,a "bottom-up" and "spiral rise" feedback process is constructed for allomeric function and spatial structure of micro-village.The so-called path creation means that since the open door policy,the development of suburbs has broken the dependence on the rural development path under the collective economy system in the planned economy period,and created the rural development path under the market economy system,i.e.the suburb function transformation and its spatial response.Based on the unceasing enhancement of ecological service functions in Xi'an suburbs,this paper proposes the hypothesis of the ecological land rent-bid rent curve in the suburbs of Xi'an,based on which,the solvency of rent shows a rapid decline with the increase of the distance from city center,and then gradual rising.4.Suburb villages in different locations are endowed with various resources,which leads dominant factors driving the development of every village to diversifying,further forming different development modes.For Xi'an suburbs,there are four types of rural development modes,i.e.policy-driven,technology-driven,demond-driven and combination-driven types.Influenced by different factors,the typical village that different rural development modes respectively correspond to develops different functions and spatial structures.