Hi, I think the topic of Urban Villages in China is relevant to your study. You may explore it to get some insights for your research.

Urban villages are a unique phenomenon that formed part of China’s urbanization efforts. Urban villages are villages that appear on both the outskirts and the downtown segments of major Chinese cities, including Shenzhen and Guangzhou. They are surrounded by skyscrapers, transportation infrastructures, and other modern urban constructions. Urban villages are commonly inhabited by the poor and transient, and as such they are associated with squalor, overcrowding and social problems. However, they are also among the liveliest areas in some cities and are notable for affording economic opportunity to newcomers to the city.

Urban villages are not regulated by any form of centralised urban planning. Most of them are heavily populated, intensely developed, and lack infrastructure. Some villages' building density is greater than 70%. They are composed of crowded multi-story buildings ranging from three to five (or more) floors, and narrow alleys, which are difficult for vehicles to pass through. Inside villages, it can be dark and damp year round and lighting may have to be kept on even during daylight hours. However, many villages have designated areas at their core which house cultural facilities and examples of historic architecture, while others have special shopping and market streets, sometimes reserved for pedestrians.

On the one hand, the villages serve to provide cheap accommodation for the impoverished population who come from the rural areas to try to make a living in the city. On the other hand, they have become the breeding grounds for social problems such as crime, drug addiction, alcoholism, and prostitution. Some consider urban villages to be a form of slum with Chinese characteristics. Whether these issues are a function of economics or spatial realities is up for debate.

Attached are some articles on land use policy and urban villages in China. Hope they are of useful to you.

Dear Dr. Chee hung Foo thanks a lot for devoting your time and energy! I really appreciate your help stay blessed!

Other scholars, still I am looking for your invaluable suggestions and responses!

Australia has three levels of government: federal, State and local government. Local government is a creature of the State. One of the best case studies of peri-urban governance in Australia that I can think of is that of the Upper Yarra Valley and Dandenong Ranges Authority in the eastern outskirts of Melbourne. The area consists of mixed intense urban, semi-rural, cropping, grazing, parks and broad acre bushland (forest). In the 1970s and early 1980s, there was strong pressure from the residents of those scenically diverse areas to strengthen the town planning controls. In 1975, pro-planning, pro-community candidates won a majority in the Shire of Sherbrooke and retained that majority for almost 20 years. They argued for a regional planning authority that would include the neighbouring Shire of Lillydale which most of the time had a pro-development council.

The State did not wish to create a fourth tier of government, but the Upper Yarra Valley and Dandenong Ranges Authority came into being with a charter to introduce planning controls of a regional scale. The composition, I recall, was multisectoral – representatives from each of the councils, plus conservation, farming, business and state government representatives. It wrote a regional plan which was endorsed by the State and required certain classes of development applications to be referred to the Authority before the local government could consider them. In particular, subdivisions.

Restrictions on development of course are always contentious and in 1992 a pro-industry, pro-development government gained power at the State level and abolished the Authority.

However, a large number of the restrictive overlays remained in place and the region remains a scenically diverse and appealing area to visit. Some big infrastructure utilities which would have facilitated continuous urban growth were not built and developers went elsewhere.

Some lessons for governance are: the authority was accepted as legitimate because the main stakeholder sectors were represented on the decision-making body (there was vehement community opposition to constituting the body entirely with local government representatives); partly because the authority did a fair amount of planning workload that otherwise would have been a financial burden on the councils; the body survived because it had the support of a progressive State Government; the body was desired by the local populations who hold a strong affection for the semirural, semi-bush, semi-urban landscapes.

The body was funded by a levy upon municipal rates, meaning that did not have to have its own revenue collecting taxing powers.

It is hard to envisage such a body being created today. Governments at both the federal and State levels have adopted the neoliberal policy mindset which sees all planning regulations as an obstacle to economic development, burdensome "red tape" instead of what they really are which is a form of protection of the property rights of existing landowners. (New development in an area can compromise the amenity of existing landholders so weakens their property rights).

Governments are now stripping back controls that have in some cases been accepted for 30 years. In Australia, the quality of city design is going backwards. The reasons are political pressure from business, and acceptance of the false neoliberal ideology.

Unfortunately, most of the signature documents of that era were not digitised at the time and aren't easily accessible online. I have attached one which doesn't say much about governance but does indicate the nature of the controls over land use that were deemed to be necessary at the time.

I recently published a paper in Cities that reviewed some of these issues. This is my paper: Sorensen, A. (2016). 'Periurbanization as the institutionalization of place: The case of Japan.' Cities 53: 134-140. 

These are some of the papers that I think are really relevant to answering your question.

Friedmann, J. (2011). Becoming urban: Periurban dynamics in Vietnam and China - introduction. Pacific Affairs, 84(3), 425–434.

McGee, T.G. (1991). In N. Ginsberg, B. Koppel, & T.G. McGee (Eds.), The emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia: Expanding a hypothesis. The extended metropolis: Settlement transition in Asia (pp. 3–25.). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

McGee, T.G., & Robinson, I.M. (Eds.). (1995). The mega-urban regions of Southeast Asia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Simon, D. (2008). Urban environments: Issues on the peri-urban fringe. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 33, 167–185.

Webster, D. (2011). An overdue agenda: Systematizing east Asian peri-urban research. Pacific Affairs, 84(4), 631–642.

Thanks a lot Professor Goeff Edwards and  Professor  Andre Sorense for your kindness for sharing with me these invaluable materials & devoting your time and energy to help me! I have downloaded them and I'll read them. Thanks again!

Hi

Here are more relevant articles, hopeful will help.

Dear colleague,

I don't know if you read French, but the fact is that the notion you are dealing with has been used a lot by French and French Speaking scholars.

Here are some of the references

Ségolène Darly about the Paris region:

http://norois.revues.org/2691

About Québec, Christopher Bryant and Salma Loudiyi:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Bryant3/publication/268334369_Introduction__Perspectives_contemporaines_sur_la_gouvernance_des_territoires_priurbains/links/55063c460cf231de0777e7c5.pdf

Anne-Marie Jouve and Gisèle Vianey:

http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=ECRU_330_0027

Damien Denizot et al. about Lyon and Grenoble:

http://www.unil.ch/files/live/sites/ouvdd/files/shared/Colloque%202005/Communications/B)%20Gouvernance/B1/C.%20Fauvel%20et%20al.pdf

A. Torre et al.: (6 case studies in France)

http://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-regionale-et-urbaine-2006-3-page-415.htm

Chloé Vitry:

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01153346/document

And about Africa:

Théodore Tréfon:

http://difusion.ulb.ac.be/vufind/Record/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/52626/Home

S. Abdedaiem (Tunisia):

http://www.theses.fr/2009PA100035

Sarah Dauvergne on Accra and Yaoundé:

https://agritrop-prod.cirad.fr/557714/1/document_557714.pdf

Inge Wagemakers on Kinshasa:

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=27395472

See also Serge Cogels and T. Trefon:

https://cea.revues.org/488

and my professor (Paris between 1990 and 1994) Jean-Louis Chaléard:

https://tem.revues.org/3030

Hoping it is useful,

Best regards

d.

Chapter Introduction : Perspectives contemporaines sur la gouvernanc...

Hello,

Check my profile on Research Gate. There are many publications that deal with periurban governance even though the word 'governance' is not mentioned in the titles!

Chris Bryant

I think the following book might be helpful for your study:

Biliang Hu, 2013. Informal Institutions and Rural Development in China. (Routledge Studies on the Chinese Economy).

Hello,

There is also a substantial number of references in French on peri-urban governance. Again, I suggest you look at my profile on Research Gate.

I'm still in the process of adding full texts to my profile.

Chris Bryant

 Thanks all for your invaluable contributions!

I assume that peri-urban refers to places that are becoming urban. Large scale transitions in land use would be happening in such a place. Legal structures will differ from country to country, but there are some commonalities that should be considered in any case. For example, in the USA many aspects of utilities (i.e., local streets, sewers, water pipes, and electric wires) are built by private developers, but the public sector or utility companies provide the major features of these systems. So this is a stage in development in which the public sector can have a major influence. Wilbur Thompson (the author of A Preface to Urban Economics) once said something like: if I can control the sewers, I can control the shape of the city. This could be said of other systems as well. For example are major streets radial or are there also ring roads.

The nature of the property tax system needs to be addressed at this stage. Assessment administration is a key feature when values are changing rapidly.

However zones of land use are established, maintained and grow in the country, they must be considered at this stage. The minimization of boundary effects from zone to zone will be critical in creating a livable environment.

Building codes or liability systems need to be in place. Again, different countries will do this in different ways.

Perhaps most importantly, a system of property rights must be in place. Who owns what must be well established. Then transitions in allowing who owns what must be made inexpensive and rapid.

We developed an issue of unexpected effects of spatial planning in peri-urban areas.

See: http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1TFUNy5jORX~y

The term peri-urban has replaced for many researchers the English terms such as rural-urban fringe and rurban fringe. Peri-urban is not simply the areas on the edges of cities and their agglomerations. The actual term peri-urban I believe was first used in the French literature. One thing stands out in the more recent research and that is that there is a substantial overlap between the different territories referred to by these different terms. 

Peri-urban thus covers a wide range of situations and from the perspective of governance processes and structures,  it is important to recognize these differences, e.g. the relative importance of the agricultural population, neo-rural populations and populations in small towns and villages, as well as the relative importance of different activities (agriculture, tourism, conservation areas (such as natural parks or reserves)). 

Governance processes are at least as important as land use planning especially since land use planning cannot deal with many of the more significant themes that one finds in different peri-urban territories, such as effective communication between the different legitimate segments of interest in the population as well as with local and regional elected officials and  professionals. A particularly important form of development planning is strategic development planning for and by the people which started developing on an important scale in Canada during the late 1980s. Such strategic planning lends itself particularly well to effective forms of governance structures and processes.

Chris Bryant

I would suggest you to read two books

Global City-regions by Allan Scott 

global city-regions by Simonds and Hack

On also working paper series on

‘Peri-urban Dynamics: Population, Habitat and Environment on the Peripheries of Large Indian Metropolises’, 25-27 August, 2004, International India Centre, New Delhi.

Please note that there are governance structures and governance processes.

Governance tens to be more open and inclusive than other forms of management and land use panning in periurban areas. What is important in governance processes is that the interests represented in the discussions can change over time, and sometimes very quickly. This is because we cannot expect those who initiate a governance process to have identified all the legitimate interests that need to be represented and mobilized from the start. Thus, governance processes to be realistic are dynamic. As new legitimate interests are identified (often because they have not been considered important initially, but also because as the discussion evolve, it becomes clear that certain issues are not being tackled and then it might be useful for new interests to be represented in the governance process.

Chris Bryant

Article Peri-Urban to Urban Landscape Patterns Elucidation through S...