- Illegal Construction on the urban Fringe as new Landscapes of urban Sprawl: the case of Nanjing, China    1647 kb by    LI, Zhiming & Wang, Wei | ar_lzm@hotmail.com    Short Outline The following will be discussed: Illegal construction on the urban fringe in Nanjing as new landscapes of urban sprawl. The political economy and institutional analysis of illegal construction. The proposals for governance of illegal construction in Nanjing metropolis. Abstract Illegal land use and construction on the urban fringe is very prevalent in China today. These illegal activities may be divided into two kinds: one is self-help housing by peasants without cultivated land especially in urban villages, and the other is organized large-scale real estate development on the collective-owned land by peasant collective committee. However, compared to the rich literature on the self-help housing, relatively little is known about the latter, which is a kind of new landscape of urban sprawl in China. This study attempts to unveil the reasons that cause the latter illegal phenomena prevail in China¡¯s urban development in recent years, namely real estate development on the collective-owned land£¨also called small property housing£©, and presents Nanjing as a case study. After the political economy and institutional analysis of this kind of illegal land use and construction, it is found that the finance dilemma of peasant collective committee, the deliberate institutional ambiguity of land system and the formation of resistance identity of the peasant collective committee are major factors leading to the organized large-scale real estate development on the collective-owned land on the urban fringe. Keywords Illegal construction, urban fringe, Nanjing, land system, political economy, institutional analysis Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2008: Urban Growth without Sprawl   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper