Research On Polycentric Governance Of Fire Safety In Rural-urban Continuum Community

With the progress of urbanization and the expropriation of a large number of land in the urbanfringe, there emerge lots of a third type of community that falls in between the urban and villagecommunity—the rural-urban continuum community, which has a complex and active nature, ofrelative independence and dynamic characteristics. This type of community promotessocio-economic development, but is flawed with serious fire safety problems at the same time.These communities are in high risk situation of fire, even higher than rural communities. It isestimated that around20-30%fires of the whole nation and over70%serious fire accidents brokeout in these areas. Many fire service workers and scholars have done a lot of researches andanalysis on this issue and put forward a series of rectification and reform measures. However, mostof these measures don’t achieve the desired effect, as they are implemented from the point of thegovernment and can’t arouse the enthusiasm and motivation of self-management of the public,who is the direct beneficiary of fire safety.This paper expounds main problems and their causes of fire safety management in therural-urban continuum community: illegitimate buildings with congenital deficiency of fireprotection; lagging urban public supporting facilities and planning; little popular awareness of firesafety or knowledge of evacuation and self-rescue; the general potential fire safety hazard hiding inthe rental housing,“three in one” buildings (i.e. a building incorporated into offices, dormitory,workshop or warehouse, three in one), and public places of entertainment, etc.Meanwhile, this paper compares the fire safety management patterns at home and abroad,founding that there is a gap between the fire safety management in Chinese rural-urban continuumcommunity and that from abroad, especially on the following aspects: functional positioning of thecommunity administration organization, allocation of fire-fighting facilities, publicity andeducation of community fire safety, professional skills of community managers and emergencypreplanning.These problems make it an urgent task to study and explore new fire safety managementpattern in the rural-urban continuum community. As a whole new theory of public management,polycentric governance can improve the usage of public resources, advocating a democraticself-governing pattern with distributed powers, diversified administration, and existing outside thegovernment. This pattern is very competent and cooperative, and is widely carried over into public affairs at home and abroad. According to the dilemma of “government not working” and “marketnot working” on the fire safety management in the rural-urban continuum community, this paperproposes to apply polycentric governance here, sets up a polycentric governance pattern for it--firesafety workstation, and studies the subjects taking part in the fire safety management in this patternas well as their roles, duties and supervision system, opening up a new way to solve this issue.With the case of T community, one of the rural-urban continuum communities in Binjiang Zone,Hangzhou City, this study has made significant progress in reasoning the possibilities of theapplication of polycentric governance into the fire safety management in the rural-urban continuumcommunity.