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

论文摘要(提交给伦敦大学学院2022年1月)我拟进行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”是指农民在中国迅速扩张的城市中殖民和耕种城市“荒地”的非正式实践，他们最近在农村土地被征用用于城市发展后被政府重新安置到城市环境中。也许是因为在生理上很容易被忽视，在文化上很容易被认为是农村落后的残余，城市宅基地在英语国家的学术界几乎完全没有被研究过，尽管它显然很受欢迎，并在中国的城市中存在，无论气候如何。这项研究将是关于城市宅基地的第一次深入的学术研究，旨在通过对城市宅基地人的身临其境的民族志研究、与主要利益攸关方的访谈以及定量和遥感数据分析，研究这种非正式做法的动机、作用、空间和生态范围。作为一种揭露和创造性地利用现代城市问题的现象，如土地空置、发展不平衡、农村土地被征用以及城市系统内的自然控制，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制定城市循环新陈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.