Rural Self-Organizing Resilience: Village Collective Strategies and Negotiation Paths in Urbanization Process in the TPSNT Framework: A Case Study of the Hongren Village, China

Abstract

Studies on rural transformation in the context of urbanization have always analyzed it from a single linear perspective, either top-down or bottom-up. This leads to simplistic generalizations of rural transformation models and the standardization of policy implementation. Based on the TPSN analytical framework, this study adds the temporality dimension to form a more comprehensive TPSNT framework. This paper explores the complex construction of rural space in rural transformation from the five dimensions of “territory, place, scale, network and temporality“ and takes the urban village, Hongren, in Kunming City, China, as a case study to analyze the specific transformation process of a village. The research revealed the following: First, in the face of land loss caused by government land acquisition, traditional rural autonomous organizations that have been hidden under the modern governance system have been revived under the influence of traditional elites and completed bottom-up territorialization by using some “maneuver spaces “to form a spatial base for negotiation with the government. Second, the cohesion of traditional rural autonomous organizations has increased during this process, and with the help of mobile capital such as media and personal connections, they have developed social networks that transcend the spatial boundaries of villages. Third, these newly constructed social networks are used to carry out various political strategies at various scales and finally negotiated with the government to rewrite the planning plan so that the village can continue to develop and integrate into the city. Finally, the analysis of the temporal dimensions of Hongren village revealed that even within the same village, changes in the other four dimensions develop dynamically, and rural transformation is an ongoing process. Therefore, when the government deals with rural issues in the process of urbanization, it should avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Unified policy implementation standards will have an irreversible negative impact on rural autonomous organizations.