The Urbanization Characteristics In Pearl River Delta And The Strategy On Urban Planning In The New Situation

Since the adoption of the well-known reform and open-door policies in 1978,Pearl River Delta (PRD) is becoming one of China's leading economic regions withunprecedented urbanization speed. The emergence of "Three-Ins-One-Supplement"and township enterprises have significantly accelerated the process ofindustrialization and urbanization, leading to the booming up of a large number ofcounty-level cities and towns in PRD. In addition, the ever-close urban-ruralrelationship and urbanization lead to the formation of a unique rural-urban economyintegration framework in this region. Nevertheless, the economical prosperousness and the rapid urban constructionin PRD are accompanied by a series of negative impacts, which may seriouslyhinder the region's second phase development and its further urbanization if notbeing treated appropriately. Such a new situation, however, provides both challenge and opportunity. Inorder to remove the obstacles and pave the way for the second phase development ofPRD, it's imperative to take the industrial structure into a major consideration for thefuture rural-urban layout plans. The main purpose of this thesis is to explore an avenue to a rational layout forthe emerging county level cities and the urban-rural rearrangement throughinvestigating the developed towns in PRD region and assessing the characteristicsand problems occurred during their urbanization process. In particular, an improvedlayout is practically carried out on the case of Xiaolan Town and will be presentedherein. In regard to the rapid urbanization process in PRD region, the urban layoutpolicy-making should be practiced on the town (zhen) level administrative entitiesincluding their suburban districts, farmland and rural construction areas as a whole.While sticking on the principle of "Long-Term Continuous Development", "FourUnification" should also be expressed in the urban layout policy-making, that is,unification of the industrial structure, unification of the urban-rural landemployment, unification of the urban-rural plan making and their administrations.The urban-rural unification layout pan can only be achieved through fulfilling the - II -above-mentioned measures, which in turn will benefit the co-modernization andcoordination of city and farm, also reduce the notorious city-farm gap. The conclusions drawn from this project are significant to the further continuedeconomic growth in the PRD, also important to promote the urbanization in thisregion. The viewpoints presented here will also, in principle, applicable to othereconomically developed regions in China such as Bohai Gulf Region and YangtzRiver Delta, where the urbanization process is similarly fast.