| Given comparatively lower land requisition cost, the rural fringes in Chinese cities are vulnerable to rapid urban expansion and restructuring. The thesis is aimed to better understand the urban transition in this particular city region by employing a case study which identifies high-speed rail (HSR)'s unsustainable environmental and social impacts on two nearby communities, Xuejia Village and Weixing Village, in Shanghai's southwest rural fringe from the perspective of local residents. Affected by the rail construction, the land use plans in the research sites have gradually shifted from primarily high-intensity agriculture to uses more closely aligned with transportation. Based on Godschalk's "sustainability/livability prism" and other sustainable development theories, four criteria---social equity, economic security, ecological integrity, and community livability---are developed to analyze the HSR's sustainability to nearby communities. The results uncover that the ecological integrity is disturbed and the community livability is at risk after the construction due to at least three aspects of deficiency---the governance deficiency, the legislation deficiency, and the planning deficiency. The social inequality and the economic insecurity have been the product of uneven compensation and the decreased life quality perceived by the affected dwellers. Simultaneously, the local residents are experiencing a process of "disconnection" and "deterritorialization" and perceiving a sense of "placelessness". This research urges people to rethink the current urban transition in Chinese cities' rural fringe regions. As Shanghai is set as China's most promising example, those unsustainable challenges need to be identified to advance China's environmental-friendly and social-harmoniously urbanization pursuit. |
