MADE IN RURAL CHINA--The analysis and redesign of the urbanization trajectory for e-commerce villages in rural China

While informal economics are normally treated as the “sickness” of the cities to be cured, they have their own treasure parts to retain. They brought the boom of Chinese economy to some extent. In the era of great construction and rebuilding of cities as urbanization mode, developing countries may t...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sheng, Siyuan
Other Authors: Ryan, Brent D.
Format: Thesis
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/140199
Description
Summary:While informal economics are normally treated as the “sickness” of the cities to be cured, they have their own treasure parts to retain. They brought the boom of Chinese economy to some extent. In the era of great construction and rebuilding of cities as urbanization mode, developing countries may take the informal economic site as a great chance to make a profit since they have enough reasons to rebuild those areas. They are often mentioned as a problem that needs to be solved and, in most cases, it means reconstruction. Vested interests are happy to integrate these resources and announce that the threat to the cities is finally eliminated. Those reconstructions are standardizing those communities and reaping the benefits brought by the communities. They benefit not by the plunder of capital, but by the elimination of the social subjectivity of those who have created value. E-commerce villages are one of those communities. They seized the opportunity of e-commerce development to make profit and support the online economy to grow rapidly and vigorously. The informality and the “unintegration” of those areas led to the trend of reconstruction. However, the reconstructions are tending to take the existing urban pattern of residential areas as their template. This is the easiest and fastest way of thinking and not problematic in most of the cases. However, such a way made the e-commerce villages lose their locality since the templates do not actually fit the operating mode of those villages. The thesis is researching on the economic pattern and the social relation in those e-commerce villages and proposing a possible choice for those villages based on the research, trying to make the areas more economically efficient and more livable at the same time.