The Development Of Informal City In China

Nowadays, in China, the acceleration of globalization and development of urbanization,brings various changes to urban landscape in the form of extension and reconstruction, whichresults in a series of informal urban morphologies in districts of the urban fringe. Accompanyingwith globalization and urbanization is a great amount of rural labor forces flowing into urban areas.They agglomerate in the informal settlements of urban fringe, to solve the problems ofaccommodation and making a living by self-built and self-employment respectively, which leads todistinct phenomena of informal city. However, influenced by the western rationalism planningideas, these informal settlements are considered as the cancerous sore on the beautiful body of thecity in China and thus are “destroyed” due to its shabby landscapes, illegal constructions, dirtyenvironments, crowed accommodation, and crimes; while informal economy is equal to illegal“underground economy” and “black economy” and thus are extremely restricted due to its “noregistration” and “beyond control”. This kind of order and function supreme ideas, ignores theinternal vitality of the informal city, and its inherited social and cultural organic capital, negatesinformal city’s contribution to the urbanization, all of which leads to the results that informal city,as a new urban development form is denied, communities are destroyed, and the urban vitality arelosing.The researches related to informality in nowadays China are mainly focus on only oneaspect, informal settlements or informal economy, but without considering informal city as a newurban development form and merging them into the framework of informal city. In addition, mostof these researches are based on the top-down macroscopic perspectives, which cannot pry into theessence of informal city, thus neither cannot provide comprehensive and persuasive guidancetowards the planning and development of informal city.Based on the aforementioned, this paper adopts the research perspective of “daily life”, uses“community studies” method of micro-sociology to search after the operation rules of informal cityby studying the case of Kongpu District—an urban-rural mixed district but also a complete urbanunit in Ningbo, detailing its various microcosmic informal phenomena in daily life. This paper details the informal phenomena from two aspects——informal settlement andinformal economy by combining the methodology of observation, interview, questionnaire and soon to gain data and information. The result comes to that contrast to its seemingly negative image,the Kongpu District possess internal vitality and resilience when face up to fluctuations caused bypolitical, economic and social changes, namely it could regain new balance through adaptation,adjustment, and even creativity, which manifests in the practice of daily life. This paper one theone hand, emphasizes the importance of this internal vitality and resilience; one the other hand,points that informal city does exist a series of ignorable problems need to be solved.