Land use transition between planned and spontaneous development. Comparing patterns of change in two rural settlement of Fujian province

Rural settlements in China face different critical challenges in the current civilisation course, which aims at drastically alleviating poverty and building a prosperous, harmonious and beautiful nation. Indeed with the turn of the millennium, the Chinese central government started promulgating arrays of policies targeted to promote virtuous cycles of restructuring in rural areas, which culminate with the recent Five-year Strategic Plan for Rural Revitalization (2018-2022) and situate the countryside renaissance as one of the top priority of Beijing’s agenda. However, the dramatic frictions between the urban and the rural are far to be narrowed, remaining the main obstacle to inclusive nationwide development. In the countryside, the transition from a planned to a market economy is coupling with the production of new architectural forms and spatial aggregations which are reshaping the rural territories. Taking two villages in Fujian Province, the paper compares the spatial implication of their spontaneous and planned land-use transitions. Indeed, the selected villages represent a compelling sample of current policies implementation, since one has just been the object of re-development while the other is in the process of. The purpose is to investigate the quality and intensity of their patterns of change. The methodology includes both fieldworks, based on several months of on-site surveys and deskwork, with the implementation of graphic elaborations. The results identify and describe three patterns of development, providing an overview about contemporary phenomena of land-use transition taking place in Chinese ruralities. The paper concludes highlighting the weaknesses and potentialities embedded in the showed rural fabrics, questioning their values in the pursuit of local development.