Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

The aim of the master thesis is to characterize development trends of Chinese urbanization since the establishment of People´s Republic of China until today, approaches to these trends and evaluate their sustainability. Thesis includes four main parts. The first part introduces main urbanization theories: Stages of Urban Development, Differential Urbanization, and Environmental Kuznets Curve. The second part characterizes the development of Chinese urbanization, defines two main determinants of the future development and tries to cover different potential future scenarios. The third part deals with Chinese urban policies, such as five-year-plans, Urbanization plan and reforms. After that, the sustainability issue is evaluated. Last part of the thesis deals with urbanization trends and policies in Chongqing municipality.

My dissertation questions contemporary accounts of a transition from modern to global urbanization, as embedded in urban geography literature and in popular debates, policies, and urban planning practices in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. The dominant transition narrative argues that there has been a shift from forms of modern urbanization (localized, state-based transitions from rural to urban) to emergent and uncertain forms of global, even planetary, urbanization: that we live, for the first time in human history, in an urban world. These accounts claim, ultimately, that the spacetimes, forms, categories, and practices or experiences of urbanization have changed irrevocably, and that politics is changing with it. In other words, they offer what I call transition metanarratives of the spatiotemporality, ontology, epistemology, and phenomenology of both urbanization and politics. Despite these claims of radical transformations in urbanization and politics, the geographic and political imaginaries in these accounts rely on boundary practices that invoke distinctively modern arrangements. The patterns of progress and return that these boundary practices generate are characteristic of the aporia. An aporia is a line that, in the process of being drawn, simultaneous constitutes entities, categories, or concepts as mutually incompatible and jointly necessary (Derrida 1993). These entities can take the form of a traditional binary (rural/urban; nature/culture; local/global; whiteness/other), or of a presence and its limit (this body/that body; community/lack of community), or of what might be called the boundaries of authorization (spacetime, ontology, epistemology, phenomenology). In all cases, aporetic boundaries create inherently unstable relations that Foucault (2002: 371) characterizes as the “hiatus between the ‘and,’” the spatial gap and temporal pause within the dynamic of determination and redetermination. The instability of the aporetic hiatus generates a desire for sovereign security, even as it ensures that sovereignty is an impossible dream. My dissertation interprets development iii iv proposals and community plans in Kelowna as expressions of these patterns of aporetic boundary generation, degeneration, and regeneration. In the midst of this encounter with seemingly over-determined limits, the aporetic hiatus offers a productive site of under- determination, where the drive for the sovereign capacity to decide and determine is held, temporarily at least, in abeyance. I use local aesthetic productions – the ‘revitalization’ of the downtown main street; an artist’s residency/installation piece – to engage the hiatus as a site where the vulnerability of aporetic boundaries can be experienced not as threat but as possibility. Rather than a determinative politics of the alternative, the transition, or the escape, which reproduces dominant modern geographical and political boundaries as authoritative and inescapable, this aporetic hiatus opens modes of engaging with the unstable boundaries of politics, without the panicked return to sovereign decision- making. / Graduate / delacey@uvic.ca

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1965 W281

The purpose of this study is to analyze how a rural muncipality with negative population growth promotes year-round residency. Using Lysekil municipality as an example, this study aims to investigate both the consequences of a declining year-round population, and how the municipality encourages population growth in the Commune. Of course, this is an extremely broad subject which can be approached from many angles. With this in mind, areas such as urbanization, attractiveness and place-marketing were scrutinized in detail. Using qualitative research (and empirical data) from various literature, as well as semi-structured interviews with employees of Lysekil municipality, the study revealed that a declining year-round population resulted in declining tax revenue. This tax shortage could lead to the municipality becoming unable to offer services that meet the expectations of the local population. However, the study also revealed that Lysekil municipality has great potential to achieve the population growth it desires. This can be accomplished by appropriate investments into attractive living situations as well as effective communications in the shape of the local internet and public transportation. For Lysekil municipality to become a year-round vivid municipality would require several measures, alongside investment, in both outer and inner factors.

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

published_or_final_version / China Area Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / Geography / Master / Master of Philosophy