A Flexible Rural Urbanization Mode Integrating Pluriactivity And Mobility

In current new urbanization era,rural development and employment have become important issues of concern.Although there are profound works in recent years,existing progress on rural employment are mostly city-centered and Western-centered,and a systematic explanation and framework on China's rural employment is blank.Classic theories of rural development and urbanization from Adam Smith,Karl Marx,and Arthur Lewis and successors after them indicate that pluriactivity and mobility as the transitional process of urbanization and will end up in highly specialized rural employment and the one-way immigration to the cities aimed at highly specialized and fixed urban employment.This thesis attempts to propose another possible rural employment pattern in new urbanization era which is characterized with pluriactivity and mobility.The thesis fundamentally attempts to take rural employment as the sticking point to understanding rural urbanization system.Through a macro-perspective observation on historical evolution of pluriactivity and mobility and their relevance with urbanization,this thesis tries to conclude and construct an explanation framework of historical rural employment and further discuss the future pattern of rural employment and its implications to the new urbanization within the framework.This thesis firstly reviews four stages of evolution of rural employment including the Traditional Times,Ming-Qing Dynasties and Modern Times,the Maoist China Times and the Rapid Urbanization Times,especially the characteristics and roles of pluriactivity and mobility and its relationship with urbanization in each stage.The results showed that in different times in China's history,rural employment is never a closed system,but an open systems associated with the external urban and rural space,and in which pluriactivity and mobility are significant and stable characteristics.The pluriactivity and mobility originated before Song Dynasty,then became common phenomenon in Ming and Qing Dynasty and continued to the present,and their contents,scales and performances changes with the evolution of urbanization.On the basis of the review of history the thesis proposes an explanation framework with the core concept,the useful labor,whose key hypothesis is the pluriactivity and mobility is the pursuit of supplement of useful labor when agriculture cannot produce enough internal useful labor in a changing context of urbanization.Pluriactivity can be seen as the pursuit of supplement of useful labor in external industries while mobility is the pursuit of supplement of useful labor in external space.According to the framework,the future of pluriactivity and mobility depends on the following two factors,the future evolution of internal useful labor of agriculture and potential of urbanization(which include the capacity and the amount of useful labor of the cities).By examining both the foregoing conditions,this thesis presents that in the context of the tradition and states-quo of China's rural area and the current stage of urbanization,it is impossible to repeat the of large-scale one-time migration and a fixed urbanization pattern and path of western experiences which indicated by classical theories,but pluriactivity and mobility can be the low-cost,sustainable alternative.Finally,the thesis proposed a possible solution for urbanization in the context of post-modernism and the new urbanization era,thus the flexible urbanization mode integrating pluriactivity and mobility,and the corresponding spatial form,thus the urban-rural integrated metropolitan area.Then the thesis and further illustrate the rationale and key principles of flexible urbanization mode.