The changing scale and spatial structure of Chinese city regions A case study on the development of Panyu district in Guangzhou metropolitan area

Since the late 1990s, the rapid urbanisation process in China has been related to an apparent paradigm change in the spatial development model of Chinese city regions. With the development focus shifting to large cities, the roles and development patterns of small towns have changed. The bottom-up, self-organised and dispersed development models that prevailed during the 1980s are less relevant. Instead, land use planning for these small towns is increasingly integrated into government regional development visions, with large cities as the cores. There have also been changes to administrative boundaries (rescaling of government) to facilitate more strategic and coordinated regional development. This paper contributes to the understanding of such changing scale and spatial structure of Chinese city regions through a case study on the Panyu district, a former small town in Guangdong province that has been integrated into the development of Guangzhou metropolitan area since the year 2000. The study shows that despite concerted attempts by government to shape spatial development in more sustainable ways, new settlement has mostly taken the form of dormitory (sleeping) suburbs that have not reduced congestion in the city centre. Based on this empirical study, the paper also facilitates the understanding of contemporary local conditions for the development of small towns within the regional development context in China.