"Ruralising Urbanisation: Homesteading, Subverting and Metabolising in China's Growing Cities"

我提议的博士研究旨在通过研究“城市宅基地”来重新思考城市新陈代谢的潜力，“城市宅基地”是中国快速扩张的城市中农民公民殖民和培育城市“荒地”的非正式实践，他们最近被政府征用了农村土地用于城市发展后，被重新安置在城市环境中。也许是因为它在物理上很容易被忽视，在文化上很容易被视为农村落后的残余，尽管城市宅基地在中国各地的城市都很受欢迎，无论气候如何，但在英语学术界，它几乎完全没有被研究过。本研究将是对城市自耕农的第一次深入的学术研究，旨在通过对城市自耕农的沉浸式民族志、对主要利益相关者的访谈以及定量和遥感数据分析，研究这种非正式实践的动机、机构、空间和生态范围。作为一种揭示和创造性地利用现代城市问题的现象，如土地空置、不平衡发展、农村土地征用和城市系统内对自然的控制，研究城市宅基地将有助于更好地理解快速城市化的影响，以及基层实践在创建城市循环代谢战略方面的潜力。

Lay Summary (as submitted to UCL January 2022)My proposed PhD research intends to rethink the potentials of urban metabolism by looking at "urban homesteading", the informal practice of colonising and cultivating urban "wastelands" in China's rapidly expanding cities by farmer-citizens, who have recently been resettled in urban environments by the government after the expropriation of their rural land for urban development. Perhaps because it is physically easy to miss and culturally easy to dismiss as a remnant of rural backwardness, urban homesteading has remained almost completely unstudied in the English-speaking academia despite its evident popularity and presence in cities across China regardless of climate. This research, which would be the first intensive academic study of urban homesteading, intends to study the motivations, agency, spatial and ecological scopes of this informal practice through immersive ethnography of urban homesteaders, interviews with key stakeholders and quantitative and remote sensing data analysis. As a phenomenon that exposes and creatively exploits modern urban issues such as land vacancy, uneven development, the expropriation of rural land and control of nature within urban systems, studying urban homesteading will allow better understandings of the effects of rapid urbanisation as well as the potential of grassroots practices in creating strategies for circular urban metabolism.