Wang, Hanxi; (2025) Ruralizing Urbanisation: Opening the Wastelands of Rapid Urbanism. Presented at: 2025 AAG Annual Meeting, Detroit, MI, USA.

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Abstract

In metropolitan Wuhan, a 78-year-old man climbs through a 7m-tall fence, walks up a hill of excavated soil to neat patches of vegetables cultivated in the middle of a construction site that has lain vacant for over a decade. This, he said, is his “kaihuang” – his opening of wasteland. Half a century ago, the old man was also “kaihuang”-ing this land, but as a member of the production brigade in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. He planted rice here all his life till, in 2005, the city expropriated the rural fields for urban development, demolished them, but never built upon them. As he kept watch over the land’s second wasting, the old man returned to re-cultivate "his" land in 2018, and has continued to return every year, despite the city's equally persistent demolition of his vegetables . The old man is far from alone. Indeed, since the 1978 reform, China’s cities have expanded over five times beyond their original footprint with the expropriation of rural land accounting for over half of the expanded area. Within this context, an astonishing amount of ordinary people have been quietly re-ruralizing the wasteland of Chinese cities. Presenting remote sensing, social media, and ethnographic data collected at over 100 different sites of kaihuang in the megacities of Guangzhou and Wuhan, this paper examines kaihuang’s simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary ruralization of urbanisation, and the complex clashing of urban crises, rural knowledge, and broader environmental, cultural, and historical concerns in the everyday lives of urbanisation.

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