The role of informal ruralization within China’s rapid urbanization

China’s expanding cities are secretly ‘sprouting’ with vegetables owing to a practice called chengshi kaihuang (CK, )—an informal practice where citizens infiltrate the neglected spaces of China’s rapid urbanization for the cultivation of vegetables.

By Hanxi Wang
Nature Cities (2024)

Excerpt:

In stagnant construction sites, neglected landscaping and forgotten spaces under viaducts and highways, China’s expanding cities are secretly ‘sprouting’ with vegetables owing to a practice called chengshi kaihuang (CK, )—an informal practice where citizens infiltrate the neglected spaces of China’s rapid urbanization for the cultivation of vegetables. The name CK is a combination of two terms—chengshi (), meaning ‘urban’, and kaihuang (), an evocative term meaning ‘the opening of wasteland.’ In the long span of China’s history as an agrarian nation, kaihuang has been both a pragmatic and a symbolic practice of resilience. From an ancient poet’s opening of rural wasteland to escape the corruptions of the city11 to the Communist call for self-sufficiency through wasteland cultivation during the Sino-Japanese War12,13,14, kaihuang is a deceptively simple act of vegetable growing that carries within itself an almost utopic desire to survive and create alternative futures from precarity.

To this day, a sculpture of the ‘Kaihuang Bull’ stands before the Shenzhen Municipal Party Committee Building as a symbol of the pioneering kaihuang spirit of laborers that turned a small fishing village into a megacity through hard work, perseverance and creativity15. In the case of CK, isolated individual citizens have turned this pioneering spirit on the wastelands of China’s rapidly expanding cities and informally created thousands of acres of urban agriculture.

Abstract

In China’s rapidly urbanizing cities, chengshi kaihuang (CK), an informal practice of urban agriculture, has been quietly encroaching into neglected urban spaces for the cultivation of vegetables. China’s unprecedented transformation from an agrarian nation to a nation of megacities over the past four decades has relied massively upon the incorporation of rural land and people in the construction and operation of its cities. Yet, while some scholars have begun to unpack the complex agency of rural bodies in China’s urban environments, the rural is generally understood to be residual or obsolete against the overwhelming, top-down power of urbanization. Here we propose, through a remote sensing study of the practice, CK as an example of the bottom-up, ruralizing agency of ordinary people within China’s rapid urbanization and present data on the spatial impact of CK’s ruralization upon the central urban districts of Wuhan, a Chinese megacity.

Read the complete paper here.