Fuelled by rapid urbanisation, urban spatial expansion is increasingly encroaching on the rural hinterland of large metropolises around the world, making a type of spatiality referred to as the “peri-urban” an important focal point for urban studies. Peri-urban residential settlement development in Chinese cities has been put on a fast track in recent years, however, its current situation has been little documented and its implications for sustainability not well understood. The main contributions of this research to the existing literature is considered to be two-fold: Firstly, this research has filled the research gap by providing a more up-to-date empirical study of peri-urban settlement development in the Chinese city of Tianjin with a specific focus on residential settlements and presenting the current and emerging challenges that face sustainable peri-urban settlement development; Secondly, this research has also made contributions to research in the context of sustainability by adopting an integrated research methodology that combines case-study-based systemic evaluation with assessment of stakeholder perspectives and decision-making dynamics. In this study, a theme-based evaluation framework is developed and used to assess the sustainability outcome of three recently developed peri-urban residential settlement cases in Tianjin, China, with each representing one typical peri-urban settlement type, i.e. rural resettlement project; affordable housing compound; and suburban commercial housing estate. Their specific approaches to achieving sustainable development are discussed, and remaining problems and challenges are identified and analyzed with suggestions for the complementary approaches and progression in the planning and management of peri-urban settlements. The evaluation framework is also used to examine the perceptions of the stakeholders of urban development on peri-urban sustainability. By making a comparison between the delivered sustainability outcome of the settlement cases and the stakeholders’ perceptions on sustainability, it was revealed that lower levels of sustainability performance in the settlement development outcome coincided, to a large extent, with lower levels of conformation on the conceptions of sustainability between the decision-makers of the development and the residents of the communities developed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:567384 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Sun, Lu |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/38337/ |
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