Desakota landscapes

This chapter addresses one of the consequences of the extremely rapid growth of China’s major cities, namely the impact on the immediate hinterland of the burgeoning cities. Here a new form of landscape has emerged, first noted with respect to similar areas around other fast-growing metropolises in south-east Asia. The term given to these landscapes is desakota, from two Bahasa Indonesian words, ‘desa’ meaning village and ‘kota’, a town. Desakota symbolises a landscape in which urban and agricultural forms of land use and settlement coexist and are intensively intermingled. In the case of the megacities of eastern China, the area covered by these landscapes is extensive, a creation of phenomenal urban and economic growth. The chapter begins with an overview of four decades of rapid urbanisation fuelled by rural-urban migration. It considers some of the problems faced by these migrants and the strategies of the city governments who have used centrifugal development as a means of generating substantial revenues. The lack of concern often shown for loss of prime farmland has resulted in a multiplicity of extensive development projects, boosting city coffers but displacing people and reducing the nation’s ability to feed itself. Complaints from villagers displaced by the urbanisation process are usually set aside by the desire for the country’s economic advancement. However, the extent of urban sprawl has brought city administrations into conflict with central government, with the latter increasingly concerned over loss of prime farmland. Hence, various attempts have been made to ensure that national norms regarding the amount of farmland are respected, though city government may still permit development on good agricultural land while bringing more marginal and/or ecologically sensitive land into cultivation. The latter can add to environmental problems while failing to compensate for food production lost from good quality farmland. Examples of farmland protection as well as failures to protect are used to illustrate the uneven nature of the development process. The second half of the chapter discusses the nature of the desakota landscape and the increasingly threatened farmland within this landscape. Some parallels are drawn with ‘edgelands’ in the developed world, though the scale and extent of the desakota landscapes are distinctive. The intermingling of housing and industry is part of the chaotic and uneven nature of urban sprawl, with remnants of traditional villages often remaining amidst modern high-rise and industrial complexes. The nature of this surviving farmland is discussed, with intensification of production to meet the needs of the adjacent urban market a common feature. Examples from the hinterlands of Beijing and Xi’an are used to exemplify some of the ongoing processes.