Wang, Xiao Lu

In this study, we focus on the redevelopment of urban villages in China and the roles and evolutions of the commons that holds together these special villages. Urban villages are essentially villages that have become enveloped by the rapid expansion of cities. Villages in China collectively own their rural land, unlike state-owned urban land. This difference in ownership rights played a significant role in the formation of urban villages. While the state could develop land around the villages, the village land itself was often left untouched, leading to these pockets of rurality within the city. Due to this unique land ownership situation, development within urban villages often occurs informally. Many regulations and planning guidelines that apply to state-owned urban land do not apply to urban villages.

As millions of migrant workers seek jobs in cities, many settled in urban villages where housing is affordable. To accommodate the increasing demand for housing, the construction in urban villages happens incrementally and organically, with villagers adding floors to their houses or building new structures. They may not adhere to building codes and safety regulations. This gives rise to unique forms of urban villages such as densely packed “handshake buildings”. Because many migrant workers do not have a Hukou (i.e., a permanent residence permit) at the city where they work, they cannot access formal social benefits (e.g., education, healthcare, property ownership) provided by the city government. But they may rely on the services operated informally by community groups or businesses without licenses in the urban village. Some see urban villages as places where commons flourishes.

Notably, in contrast to the widespread demolition of urban villages in megacities over the past few decades, reuse and preservation techniques have emerged as the primary means of enhancing the value of urban villages in recent years. Nantou's redevelopment is the case in point. With an emphasis on preserving its historical heritage, which spans 1,700 years, Nantou has been developed primarily as a site with mixed uses, cultural and residential. Some of the original residents and businesses remained. We use ethnographic methods, including document research and interviews with actors to uncover the dynamics between the state, formal neighbourhood committees and informal community groups in the redevelopment of Nantou, and the roles and evolution of commons for and under redevelopment.

In this paper, in view of the challenges facing existing integrated landscape approaches (ILAs) to balancing development and conservation, we interrogate the premises of the existing approaches, and suggest commoning as a means to drive mixed-use land development, tackle power imbalances in stakeholder engagement and foster community stewardship. We draw insights from three rural redevelopment cases in rural Hong Kong. Case analysis was performed using the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework to shed light on position rules, boundary rules, and payoff rules and how they affect who can enter what positions and have what rights and responsibilities. Through case comparisons, we find that distinct commoning models led to different levels of mixed-use land development and community stewardship. Both the collaborative governance model and the community land trust model were found to be more effective in safeguarding landscape multifunctionality. The former drove commoning of private lands and the balance of revitalization and conservation goals through policy interventions which provided not only institutional frameworks for public-private partnership but also financial incentives for bottom-up revitalisation and conservation activities. The ecovillage model dealt with a much more homogeneous group who used community land trust as the land tenure arrangement and who also shared similar priorities towards land uses, thus conducive to collective action and self-governance. However, for the agricultural cooperative model, agricultural production was still the primary land use. Moreover, the cases show that institutional innovations on position rules, boundary rules, and pay off rules were key to enabling mixed-use land development and incentivising different levels of community participation depending on the preferences and capacity of community members in landscape stewardship activities. Implications are drawn for further research and practices of integrated landscape approaches.