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

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.