Peri-urban villages in Kunming, Southwest China: history of change with dual urban–rural characteristics

The process of absorbing villages into urban areas in China is of major significance and can follow several paths. Specifically, the dual urban and rural characteristics of villages located close to cities provide new opportunities and constraints for active community engagement. This paper examines two related options through case studies in Kunming, Southwest China, and the interface between the urban and the rural in peri-urban studies. One village was transformed from a collective landholding system into a village shareholding company. In this case, villagers’ self-construction and redevelopment activities significantly changed the built environment in the settlement. The second village was transformed into a new urban residential community by property developers. In this process, villagers also had their hukou [household registration] status altered from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’. The study illustrates the variable transition processes between rural and urban in this particular region and highlights the relationship between villagers and their surrounding environment. It is argued that peri-urban spaces in Southwest China retained their distinctiveness and certain rural characteristics despite the integration through the urbanisation process, and that the relationships between villagers and their surrounding built environment are constantly being re-appropriated and reinvented.


Introduction
The process of peri-urbanisation began to be recognised in the mid-twentieth century in European countries, although there is still no unified definition of the concept. 1 In many European countries, cities have expanded outwards into formerly rural areas, which led to housing development on farmland. Existing research in this context suggests that peri-urbanisation signifies the expansion of urban areas that is accompanied by large-scale decentralisation and uncontrolled urban sprawl infiltrating rural farmland. This has resulted in different types of transition zones between cities and rural areas. These transition zones became known as peri-urban areas, which are variable in size and nature. These processes of peri-urbanisation in particular countries also vary in terms of how they have been described and defined. 2 Despite discrepancies, peri-urban areas in European countries have strong urban influences with close access to urban facilities, markets, and labour. They have close links with cities due to the considerable geographic mobility of the inhabitants, and highly developed telecommunication, information technology, and transport links.
In Asia, however, and particularly in parts of Southeast Asia, there are different types of transition districts between urban and rural designations. One of those types has been identified as an 'urban village' or 'city village'. 3 As David Simon, Duncan McGregor, and Don Thompson argue, the emergence of the 'transition area' between urban and rural zones 'reflects the phenomenal economic buoyancy of the Pacific Asian region', signifying that '"hi-tech" production now spilled out of the heavily congested metropolitan cores to cheaper, and more accessible areas beyond'. 4 In this process, the urban villages retained their distinctiveness and some rural activities, but at the same time, they were integrated into manufacturing or processing industries as part of the wider economy. This new process calls for a redefinition of traditional urban and rural distinction and provision of guidance that is suitable to use in these dual rural/urban areas. 5 This need is reinforced because China's urban villages, of which there are many, were created during a process of rapid urbanisation during which the government expropriated villages' farmland for urban expansion. In this process, because the property rights for homestead land belong to the village collectives, the village's residential area 'ownership' would normally be retained by the original villagers. Migrants from rural areas who were looking for employment in cities tended to settle in urban villages because those villages provided cheaper accommodation and easy access to urban areas wherein existed those employment opportunities. As a result of these combined influences, traditional rural zones have been gradually transformed into new combinations of urban and rural areas. In this process they have become an essential part of the urban economy and, therefore, need to be understood in more detail in order to derive policies to achieve sustainable development. 6 Existing research has so far considered the phenomenon of peri-urban areas to be part of an advanced form of sub-urbanisation or counter-urbanisation. Very often the management of peri-urban areas is relatively independent of both rural and urban controls because they are located beyond the administrative boundaries of those areas; however, they are closely related to the ecological footprints of cities which have significant impacts.
Urban villages in China have mixed characteristics of urban and rural identities and have close links with both rural and urban economies. They also have their own special characteristics, as the original villagers generally have a strong sense of belonging arising from the long history of the development of their settlements. 7 Unlike informal urban settlements in other countries, the original villager residents have a higher income than their counterparts elsewhere; this is often derived from renting living space to new incoming migrants. In order to satisfy housing demand, this has led to the rapid increase of concrete construction in villages and, thus, totally transforming the rural landscape. The lifestyle of villagers in those settlements has been impacted by their increasing mobility, the income from tenants, and the influence of the surrounding urban environment. Some villagers actively seek for employment in urban areas and engage with the training programmes provided by the local government and agencies.
This paper explores how urban villages in Kunming City interacted with urban life before and after the development projects which have impacted upon them. It argues that the urban villages in Kunming present a special form of the sub-urbanisation process. Departing from existing studies focusing on the decline of the rural villages and traditional heritage in China, this study argues that transformation of the landscape of the peri-urban areas in Southwest China highlighted the processes of those areas becoming more cosmopolitan and, at the same time, becoming locally focused. In order to explore the changes of the peri-urban spaces in Southwest China and explore potential to influence future development, the paper analyses two case studies: Xiazhuang village which underwent fundamental change from being a village collective unit to a village shareholding company; and Taihe village which was redeveloped into an urban residential district where returning villagers took up residence in the newly constructed accommodation and shared public facilities with other urban residents.
The paper is structured as follows: the first section explains the impacts of China's hukou system, the household registration system, on the spatial changes in peri-urban areas. The Liveable City Assessment Standards (2007) released by China's Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development are analysed to provide the context of the development of peri-urban area in China. The literature review in the following section explores the definitions of urban and rural areas in China; this is important because the hukou system categorises citizens into urban (non-agricultural) and rural (agricultural) residents of a particular location. Whist many villages in peri-urban areas have managed to maintain a distinctive village morphology along with rural activities, they also have to integrate into the process of urban development. Existing studies on urban villages primarily focus on the changes of 'urban villages' in Eastern China, studying how rural villages have been affected by the urbanisation process. However, little research was done regarding the peri-urban studies in Southwest China which are markedly different from other regions, giving a valuable focus for the research.
In the Methodology section, the two case studies in Kunming chosen for detailed analysis are examined. The first example, Xiazhuang village, went through two stages of changes: a bottom-up transformation before 2014 and top-down approach implemented after 2014. As part of this, interviews were carried out with both the management team and villagers to identify distinctive aspects involved. The second example, Taihe village, has been transformed into an urban residential community. In this case, returning villagers retained some aspects of their former lifestyle and tried to adjust them to the urban environment. One of the authors was closely involved in the development project of Taihe village, thus allowing ease of access for analysing documents and making observations, as well as interviews. In the sections of the two case studies, the paper analyses how building forms and landscape in the village have changed due to the increased mobility of the population, such as the migration of rural villagers to work in cities, or of urban population to rent accommodation in villages. The analysis also considers how the functions of domestic and public space in the villages have changed, linking to the residential communities themselves and the integration between the city and rural areas.
At the end of the paper, conclusions are drawn indicating the contribution of this paper to the field of understanding, and broader implications arising from this research. The study of the two peri-urban development projects highlights two key needs that peri-urban studies should consider that have been overlooked in existing studies: first, the contributions of various stakeholders in making the place; and second, the need to map the perception and actions of the villagers and other local stakeholders to allow proper identification of the characteristics of the place. It is argued that the transformation of the landscape of the peri-urban areas in Southwest China has become more cosmopolitan and, at the same time, more locally focused.

China's hukou system
This section introduces the changes of the hukou system since 2014 that have encouraged the migration of young workers from rural to urban areas. Migrants from rural areas tend to settle in villages in peri-area urban because those villages provide cheaper accommodation and easy access to urban areas; these villages may also be more familiar. To meet the needs of the increased tenant numbers, the peri-urban villages have developed to become more closely integrated with the urban infrastructure systems. The Liveable City Assessment Standards (2007) released by China's Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development are here analysed to provide the context of the development of the peri-urban area in China.
China's household registration system, the hukou system, evolved following the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949. It categorises citizens into urban (non-agricultural) and rural (agricultural) residents of a particular location. Urban residents are favoured in resource allocation compared to rural residents, though some villagers in the above scenario can have their status transformed from rural to urban residents. A study by Xu Huang, Martin Dijst, Jan van Weesep, and Nongjian Zou suggests that hukou registration plays a significant role in relatively more-developed municipalities, but is less significant in lessdeveloped municipalities, where access to civil amenities, such as social welfare and public infrastructure, is already more readily granted. 8 Farzana Afridi, Sherry Li, and Ren Yufei have highlighted that major and persistent gaps between rural migrants and urban residents existed in large urban centres in terms of employment, social insurance, and social welfare benefits. 9 Initially, the 2014 reform announced restricted access for migrants from rural areas to pensions, education, and healthcare services. However, the 2019 Urbanisation Plan suggested relaxing hukou restrictions in small and medium-sized cities with populations of 1-3 million. 10 Together with further changes enacted in 2020, these issues indicate a complex and changing situation which produces difficulties in understanding for many residents in terms of who can benefit from the new hukou policies and how to benefit from it, which is summarised below.
Currently, China has an advanced plan to settle about 100 million people in towns linked to the household registration reform. 11 In addition to loosening hukou restrictions, the plan directs local governments to promote basic public services for permanent residents and further develop urban infrastructure to handle increases in population. 12 These incentives, however, tend to favour young and educated workers rather than those without higher education qualifications, such as rural residents. Many migrants from rural areas would therefore struggle to gain hukou in the urban areas where they had been working, and this has caused a variety of social problems. 13 The dual urban-rural character of urban villages in China has resulted from two factors: the joint ownership of village land and properties; and the preference of incoming tenants for dwellings located in the cheaper and more accessible areas that urban villages provided. This has given village residents easier access to employment, or the possibility of starting small businesses in the cities. Whist many urban villages have maintained their distinctiveness in terms of village morphology and rural activities, they have had to integrate into the process of urban development, similar to the experience of peri-urban areas in other countries.
The Liveable City Assessment Standards (2007) included six assessment criteria: economic prosperity, environmental 'beauty', availability of resources, access to facilities, and public security. 14 Studies by Dongsheng Zhan, Mei-Po Kwan, Wenzhong Zhang, Jie Fan, Jianhui Yu, and Yunxiao Dang suggest that socioeconomic impacts on the individual also exert significant effects on overall satisfaction with urban liveability. These individual factors are, in descending order of importance: geographical location, type of housing, education, family size, age, and hukou status. 15 However, other studies identified a different set of factors for villagers: the geographical location, especially the distance from the nearest town or city (and the ease of accessing public transport), the population size, the infrastructure provision for water and electricity supply, and access to waste disposal. 16 For development purposes, factors such as average annual family income are used as criteria to provide basic information for each village and thus drive development priorities; however, those criteria may be different for a peri-urban area where different social groups co-exist.

'Urban' and 'rural'
Existing studies of peri-urban settlements provide support for new ways to analyse the case studies of urban villages in Southwest China, as they focus on two key aspects: the definition of the general concepts of 'urban' and 'rural', and the definition of urban and rural areas in China. Aidan Southall has argued that, in late capitalist economies, the influence of the city pene-trates the remotest places to such an extent that they all become urban in a sense. 17 In his discussion of various studies by urban sociologists and urban anthropologists, which explored how the 'urban' realm lost its distinctiveness as an object of theoretical study and basis of disciplinary focus, Southall has also analysed different situations in China. In From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat, Andrew Kipnis studied the transformed landscape and changed ways of life in a village in North China between 2005 and 2012. Based on his analysis of the theories of biological sciences and modernisation, together with the Daoist ideologies of transformation that focuses on admixture rather than replacement, Kipnis suggests that there is 'recombinant urbanisation' in China where 'practices, ideas, ideals, fantasies, dreams (and nightmares) are displaced, reinvented, or shifted rather than simply eliminated'. 18 Current studies on peri-urban areas suggest that they are a new form of the extended metropolitan region beyond the traditional dichotomy of urban and rural definitions. 19 Urban villages are closely connected to other urban and rural areas by transportation, telecommunications, and other service networks, and this had led to a blurring of physical boundaries between urban villages and other city areas, but less so in terms of status and economics. Urban lifestyles have penetrated significantly into the lives of the previously rural villagers, with the emergence of new hybrid forms of services and the associated social, economic, and political needs. 20 Fulong Wu, Fangzhu Zhang, and Chris Webster also argue that urban villages provide resources for migrants who need access to cheaper accommodation and informal job markets. 21 Therefore, there are not only rapid changes of land-use but also a changing social composition which needs to be supported by infrastructure and services.
Existing studies also show differences between the various social groups that rent accommodation in an urban village. For example, a study by Mai Corlin was concerned with the artists and intellectuals who were involved, the villagers they met, and the local authorities they negotiated with. 22 Another example would be Hanwen Liao's study of artists renting properties in villages in the marginal area of Beijing that highlighted the different requirements for the artists and the tension between villagers and artists. The difference between the size of properties artists were able to afford compared to the size of the homes of local villagers was one of the reasons for the negative attitude of residents towards the artists. The more opulent lifestyle of artist tenants was also significantly different to those experienced by the local villages. 23 Scholarship published in Chinese has also contributed further to the understanding of the topic. Sophia Woodman has viewed the rural/urban distinction as one of a number of factors that contributed to local variation in welfare, participation rights, and relative value accorded to citizens in China. 24 Beibei Tang has also discussed how the 'not rural but not urban' governance modes of urban villages in China represented special characteristics of the state-society relationship and urban planning. 25 Chen Li, Mark Wang, and Yanan Song Li studied how households fared in the decade after land acquisition and their capability to build the skills and knowledge needed for urban life and employ-ment, thus showing how spatial change is linked to social change. 26 The results of these studies can provide guidance to inform future redevelopment projects.
In this paper, two case studies of urban villages in Southwest China, which are markedly different from urban villages in Eastern China, show a need for a different basis for comparison. This study contributes to ongoing debates by identifying what events affect the development of living and working spaces within the urban and rural element during the process of the change. It asks how the cultural, social, political, and economic relationships between villagers and the surrounding environment change, and what aspects of mixed urban and rural functions may contribute to the characteristics of the urban-rural interface.

Questions
The following are key questions as focal points for research and contribution to discussions: (1) What events affected the development of living and working spaces within the urban and rural element during the process of change? (2) How did the relationship between the villagers and the surrounding environment change in terms of cultural, social, political, and economic issues? (3) What aspects of mixed urban and rural functions have contributed to the characteristics of the urban-rural interface in this region?

Methodology
This paper studies the transformation of two examples in the city of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, in order to explore how the development of urban villages could reveal more about differences between rural and urban issues in practices. In 2011 there were more than 380 urban villages in the greater urban area of Kunming, with a total residential land area of about 19.5 km 2 . This accounted for about 7.8% of the area of the city (249 km 2 ) at the time. 27 The authors' field work indicated that, out of nearly 200 urban villages within the areas defined by the third ring road, only about 30 had completed the redevelopment process by 2018. Many new development projects have started, but due to the impacts of the Covid pandemic, they have not been completed as planned.
The research also intends to challenge the predominant focus of existing studies on urban villages of Eastern China, such as in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, where urban village development projects were first implemented. Urban villages in the west of the country, such as in Kunming, were created much later, and generally offered fewer opportunities for developing village enterprises or village industries compared to those rapidly expanding urban economies of Eastern China. Many local government policies for increasing village incomes in the west of China have focused on different top-down motivations, such as tourism or setting up training courses, creating employability for villagers, or changing the villages into a shareholding system, as the first case study demon-strates. Further, in the process of enacting the national 'Beautiful Village Initiative', the outcomes show that the processes of change are much more top-down than bottom-up in their operation. Thus, although bottom-up approaches are supposed to be valued and necessary, the research illustrates the more typical top-down situation to be found in rural areas across the country, and this study sheds light on some characteristics and issues of urban villages that are present in many other similar parts of China.
For the first case study, Xiazhuang village, interviews commenced in May 2018 with the architect working on the village masterplan, and with the Head of the Village and the management team (who coordinated the process of transferring the village from a collective unit to a shareholding company). Interviews were also undertaken with a group of villagers who expressed their views regarding the changes. 28 Further unstructured in-depth interviews were utilised to create an informal atmosphere and encourage villagers to express their opinions. The questions focused on the locals' experience of the changes in their village, but also allowed the villagers to tell their stories in their own words. Staff in the village management group talked about the process for managing change and their priorities in different stages. The interview with the lead architect gave specific information on the changes to the built environment in the village.
The second case study, Taihe village, involved analyses of the process of transformation of an urban village into an urban residential community. Returning villagers (who had moved-out during the development process) retained some aspects of their former lifestyle and tried to adjust them to the urban environment. One of the authors had also participated in the preplanning process for the development project of Taihe, which was completed in 2010. The villagers then returned to the newly constructed residential district and were visited for interviews and discussion in 2015 and in 2018. This allowed the study of living conditions of residents in the new community and of post-occupancy evaluation surveys. As a result of these studies, the research highlights new aspects of mixed urban and rural functions that need to be considered in the redevelopment. This is especially important in relation to the social and economic wellbeing aspects for redevelopment projects for urban villages and peri-urban areas in general.
In the following sections, this paper explores the following elements with respect to the dual urban and rural elements: the changed building forms and landscape in the village due to the increased mobility of the population, such as the migration of rural villagers to work in cities or of urban population to rent accommodation in villages; the changed functions of domestic and public space in villages; and the changed residential communities that are at the juncture between the city and rural areas. Xiazhuang's seven hundred years history stretches back to the Ming dynasty. Historically villagers worked as farmers, planting rice, corn, millet, and pears, with the local climate allowing crops to be produced twice a year. The original village had a land area of 16,000 mu (about 10.72 km 2 ); after the expropriation of land for development purposes in 2005, about 3,000-4,000 mu (2-2.7 km 2 ) of agricultural land remained for the residents. In the original village, there were 1,400 families, consisting of about 4,000 people. 29 Interviews carried out in Xiazhuang showed that the older generations have clear memories of the past and a strong sense of a traditional community. They commented that in the past, the villagers had much lower living standards than those found in urban areas. In the mid-1980s, residents of adjacent villages started to grow flowers and vegetables rather than their traditional crops, which attracted higher return; the villagers in Xiazhuang soon started to follow the practice. Since the 1990s, more and more young people from the village moved to urban areas to seek work. The impact of the lack of young The local government set up training courses to help villagers to gain new skills, and some villagers, generally aged between 45 and 60, moved to work in the adjacent institutes as low-skilled labour, such as cleaners. People younger than 45 were encouraged to find jobs in the city or to set up their own small businesses. Many villagers rented out some of their living space to gain additional income. There was a demand for this because the majority of small businesses in the village were run by outsiders rather than villagers themselves. This perhaps is because villagers were sometimes reluctant to start their own businesses as they felt they lacked skills or knowledge. In 2018 approximately 10,000 migrants and tenants were living in the village, two and half times the number of the original villagers at that date. The villagers' daily lives also changed following close contact with new inhabitants such as from the adjacent university. Many staff and students rented space in the village houses to set up training centres for music, art, or dance. Children in the village actively engaged with the diverse opportunities and attended many training classes. As one villager said, 'villagers wanted to be beautiful', yet the views of how to be beautiful have changed fundamentally. 30 With the increase in people's incomes and influences arising from the urban areas, the villagers' desires to build houses 'like those in cities' were stimulated. More than 500 families applied to renovate or rebuild their houses in 2010; it was not, however, until new policies were published in 2013 to allow such development, that a significant number of new constructions were carried out in the village. Within a short period, a large number of traditional timber houses were demolished and many new concrete houses were built on the sites of original houses, ignoring the village's master plan. It was difficult to implement the village plan because the owners of houses located along the public roads with more development opportunities were reluctant to relocate in order to allow the planned redevelopment. Consequently, in order to meet the demand, courtyards areas were utilised to facilitate new houses and extensions to original property boundaries occurred, causing roads to become narrower. The new houses also extended upwards gaining more floors, thus replacing traditional one-storey houses with concrete multi-storey houses, and the growth of floor space available for renting was much extended. The proportion of new concrete houses in the village increased from about 30% in 2013 to around 80% in 2015 (Figs. 3 and 4). 31 Almost all the traditional courtyard houses were demolished, apart from a few good quality examples that were converted into restaurants. Two listed buildings, Wanfeng Temple and Guanshangong Temple, were also protected from change. Some areas were rapidly transformed by small businesses, for example, one of the most developed areas was named the 'Home of Art' which serves students from the arts university across the road. The formation of the 'Home of Art' was not planned, but in 2010, heavy rain flooded the properties of more than 200 families in the village. The local government funded the construction of temporary accommodation for these 200 families in the periphery of the village next to a newly constructed road; these were simple one-storey houses built for families, based on a ratio of 20 m 2 per person. When the campus of the University was built along the other side of the road, the convenient walking distance made the area a popular A village community fund was established when the farmland was expropriated by the local government (10% of the compensation monies given by the government was converted into this fund). Initially, the fund was placed in the bank and interest payments were distributed equally to the villagers every year, but in 2014 it was decided that the village's collective landholdings and the community fund would be converted into a shareholding company. The community fund has since been used to pay for the construction of a number of public buildings and improvements to the infrastructure such as roads, drainage, and waste systems. The villagers therefore became shareholders of public buildings including the Home of Art, a cultural centre, and a school, each of which is paying a substantial rental fee each year. For example, the Provincial Education Bureau would pay sufficient rental fees to run the school in the village and the cultural centre was rented out to local street administration offices.

Xiazhuang village in Chenggong
In the interviews, the villagers declared that they are proud of owning the shared dividends, which could pay out about CNY ¥4,000 (approximately GBP £440) for each person every year. Residents also collectively own the properties in the village. It can be seen that, although the villagers and the tenants are residents of the same village space, they have parallel but different ways of living and working. Variations in buildings also occurred: the villagers preferred concrete houses rather than traditional timber houses because they are 'similar to the ones in cities'. 32 A restaurant run by students was one of the few remain- The simultaneous mix of rural and urban characteristics found in the village was also a reason for some artists to rent workshops there as they preferred a setting at some distance from the chaos of the urban centre. This allowed them to participate in both urban and rural lifestyles, and their presence added to the diversity of village life. However, the different life styles ranging from new tenants, such as art students and staff, and those of the remaining local villagers are clearly retained in the private spaces of the buildings.
In Xiazhang village, many villagers had received financial compensation for their farmlands that had been expropriated for the various forms of redevelopment by the local government. Many villagers used the compensation to build new houses, buy new cars, and engage in other new recreational opportunities; further training and good education were not their top priorities. However, twelve years later, after the funding compensation came to an end, local villagers increasingly found it more important to acquire skills and knowledge that could help with job opportunities. Therefore, provision of a better education for the next generation to gain a better life has now become a priority frequently mentioned in the interviews.
Despite all the changes to the existing houses and facilities caused by the redevelopment of the area, a new overall master plan was designed for the village by the local planning department in 2019; however, the master plan has been difficult to implement. There are still questions about how best to build a new residential area that could involve the residents' participation with design and development of their neighbourhoods, to have design imbued with local identity and collective memory, and to do this in a sustainable way.
To summarise, for Xiazhuang village, all the major changes of the buildings and space before 2014 were brought about by villagers' bottom-up actions that actively responded to changes, whether because of flooding, renting houses to migrants from outside, or setting up shops or restaurants to meet the needs of students in the nearby universities. Migrants and villagers collectively made the place. Despite all the new concrete and brick houses that replaced the traditional timber houses, ritual spaces, Wanfeng Temple and Guanshangong Temple, were protected from change.
In 2014, management teams decided that the village's collective landholdings and the community fund would be converted into a shareholding company. This top-down action initiated collective production of the space compared with what happened on the ground. The immigration of artists and students enhanced the close relationship with the adjacent university. The villagers wanted 'urban' looking houses, and this was represented in terms of construction details, building technologies, and materials; this transformed what was available in the marketplace as well as the workforce.
Chen Li, Mark Wang, and Yanan Song argue that a part of this, involving the recovery of public spaces and a sense of community identity, is possible if citi-zens take a leading role, collectively getting involved in their own projects and in new residents' projects that engage with the community. 33 This leads to the second case study, which describes a village that has undergone a redevelopment project, prompting the villagers to move back into the newly constructed residential district.

Taihe urban village
Out of a total of more than 380 urban villages in Kunming, 35 were developed in the period 2009-2010, which gave rise to contrasting outcomes. These projects were to follow four guiding principles set up in the Suggestions for the Development of Villages in the Cities by the Planning and Design Institution of Kunming in 2008: 'renovation' and 'reconstruction' should be equally important; optimal urban structuring should be considered the top priority of urban village renovation projects; the overall profits of the renovation project should be maximised; and the 'one village one strategy' approach should be emphasised in response to the particular condition and history of each urban village before making plans. 34 Taihe urban village, which began to be redeveloped in 2010, followed these principles. It is located in the Dianchi Lake district, south of Kunming Old City, 5 km from the city centre (Fig. 1). The village had around 1,200 families with about 3,500 residents (Figs. 5 and 6). The original village was laid out along a small river, and all the streets, pedestrian paths, houses, and local market layout followed the direction of the stream. Along both sides of the river were public spaces for villagers, together with some small food and vegetable stalls.
The aim of the renovation project was to integrate the residential area for returning villagers with the adjacent new privately developed housing (Figs. 7 and 8). In the urban housing market, the roles of designers, developers, and building owners also evolved during the design and construction phases. According to the 'No. 2 Report of Urban Village in Kunming', the four development stages for the renewal of Taihe were the following: firstly, the urban village renovation project was set up by the government, then the developer and the source of investments were introduced; secondly, the project was closely linked to the development of local urban infrastructure and, therefore, the developers would be responsible for the development plans for the neighbouring areas; thirdly, the urban village renovation project provided new opportunities and included the villagers' participation in the decision making processes; fourthly, the overall renovation project was led by the government using community fund provided by the developer and the local government to support the implementation. 35 Proposals presented during the process of urban village reconstruction were based on general urban planning regulation including the following items: 1. Achieving greater sustainability in the residential district; 2. Maintaining the vitality of urban spaces; 3. Performing good urban design in relation to safe neighbourhood strategies, appropriate scale of street layout, walkable residential areas, and so on. 4. Encouraging the sense of belonging among the original villagers who moved back to the new residential area; 5. Developing a more reasonable way to carry out public participation exercises; 6. Increasing levels of trust among the villagers towards the urban village renovation; 7. Considering the benefits for migrant workers, low-income residents, and new residents in the urban village renovation projects; 8. Finding ways to balance the distribution of profit among stakeholders; 9. Defining the roles of urban planner and architects, with the aim of improving overall sustainability.
According to China's 1982 Constitution: 'Urban land belongs to the state. Land in rural and suburban areas shall be owned by collectives, except for those which belong to the State as prescribed by law.' 36 This means processes of development in rural areas must follow different rules to cities. Under this law, the negotiations among stakeholders were extremely complicated for the development of Taihe as it took some time to clarify the ownership and compensation amounts due to each villager. Between 2008 and 2015, the original village and adjacent factory buildings were demolished and other neighbouring sites included in the overall planning to form a new sophisticated residential district. Stakeholder meetings were held to comment and approve the plan, and to agree on the feasibility report which required a pass rate from local residents and enterprises not less than 90% and 80% respectively, leading to the formal urban village renovation project. The design principles of this project came from the master plan for the area.
Although opportunities were provided for the villagers to participate in the decision-making meetings with other stakeholders relevant to the project, it was difficult for the villagers to express their needs. The analysis of the documents for the development project showed these specific omissions were  travel needs of the villagers, who relied primarily on public transportation for visiting other parts of the city; the impacts of different sources of income; and the needs for a variety of housing types. Unfortunately, due to the lack of a mechanism to help the villagers to express their concerns and to materialise their needs into design solutions, there was a lack of 'conditions' included in the planning and design process.
When the authors surveyed the area in 2018, housing for relocating the villagers and the educational facilities had been completed (Fig. 9); however, the retail centre and office building, and most of the commercial housing, were still under construction. The villagers had returned to the newly built residential district and all the villagers' hukou were transferred from rural to urban status. The residents' association was responsible for community services and facilities associated with the relocation and resettlement of villagers, including street cleaning and security services for the new residential community and for the main road outside the community. Unlike the village community management system in Xiazhuang village, residents' committees in Taihe were not involved in local economic activities. Old and overcrowded village houses were replaced by new multi-storey apartments with unified management and construction solutions, and after the renovation project was implemented, urban facilities were introduced in the new residential district. Better constructed dwellings also provided for a safer and cleaner environment (Fig. 10).
However, the most prominent change was the road system, which assumed a car-dependent residential district and encouraged private vehicle usage. Previously, the villagers had depended primarily on bicycles and scooters as the most popular and efficient transportation methods; the roads in the old village were not set up to deal with car usage, and streets and houses were maintained at a human scale. The changes to accommodate private cars were considered one of the criteria for a liveable community. The designs for the new residential areas were, therefore, based on general urban design principles rather than on the hybrid urban and rural requirements of returning villagers.
There was also a lower provision of pedestrian walking routes and fewer measures to slow vehicle speed in the shared use areas. This occurred despite preference of relocated villagers for public transport rather than private cars. Access to the public transport system required about twenty minutes walking time, which was much longer than previously in the village.
There were difficulties for the returning villagers to adapt to these changes in a short period of time. In addition, despite the design principles aiming to integrate the residential area of returning villagers with the adjacent newly built private residential area, the different groups of residents kept to their separate lifestyles with little contact with each other. The full integration of the returning villagers into the new urban life would have also required the consideration of socio-psychological measures of urbanisation beyond the redesign of the physical environment. Neglect of these factors had therefore impacted on the overall sustainability of the redevelopment. In the development project to transform Taihe urban village into an urban residential community, renovation and sustainable design were considered. In contrast to un-designed public spaces in Xiazhuang, buildings and public spaces in the Taihe project were closely linked to the development of local urban infrastructure and, therefore, the developers would be responsible for the development plans for the neighbouring areas. Those measures focused on urban residents, but overlooked the fact that the returned villagers also need space for their continuing agricultural activities, such as drying crops. The villagers also heavily rely on public transportation system and other public services, such as shops and retail centres.

Discussion: urban vs rural?
The Taihe residential area has provided safer, cleaner, and more contemporary urban facilities for returning villagers, but it lacks the vitality of community, mixed-use development, and the local identity that Xiazhuang preserved. Nevertheless, Taihe was developed based on the green building codes for urban areas. New buildings and their environment, including both domestic and public spaces, were designed to be more sustainable in terms of qualities of outdoor and indoor environment and energy saving standards. The newly designed residential area benefited from professional design in the aspects of functional planning, sunlight analysis, parking configuration, and road network analysis, and included fire evacuation plans. The returning villagers were registered as urban residents and benefit from welfare, medical care, and educational services.
In comparison, the spatial environment in Xiazhuang village was left congested with many vehicles; poor hygiene and noise were also constant problems due to narrow streets, limited waste collection facilities, and the high density of inhabitation. There was no overall plan for the supply of water, drainage, or electricity in the village. However, Xiazhuang did benefit from its position in the peri-urban area, such as having close links to other rural and city areas, an important quality of peri-urban spaces. While it remains a rural village with a strong sense of community and shared memories of the past, it is no longer an isolated community. The lives of the villagers have become more integrated within the urban economy and society. Instead of the previously enclosed and inward focused form of the village, the dynamism inherent to the ability to attract outsiders and to develop other businesses has enabled the villagers to have a much wider access to urban life.
The components of village life have become more complex and unstable, but this has promoted further transformation and development, and had expanded human capability. Birte Nienaber and Irma Potočnik Slavic in discussing case studies from Saarland, Germany, and Slovenia have identified the importance of diversification for rural areas. 37 The diversification of farm income contributes to the vitality of the rural region and helps to retain young people in rural areas, and, therefore, attenuate demographic changes. In Xiazhuang, the production of flowers and vegetables by the villagers was developed to meet the demands of more distant markets. Some villagers in Xiazhuang moved to other places to take advantage of larger scale agricultural activities, or sought urban employment by travelling longer distances outside the local areas. This in turn promoted changes in the village, leading to larger populations and more complex business activities. The influence of urban factors on the villagers' thinking and life planning is also evident: twelve years after being paid the compensation fund, the villagers are now thinking about developing new lives for themselves and for the next generation. A school was set up which was highly ranked in the needs expressed in the interviews with the villagers.
In Xiazhuang, the innovative stakeholder system and the strong local government development policy supported the diversification of incomes, thus contributing to the vitality of the village. The Xiazhuang village management group have largely been able to maintain control of their shareholding company to pursue benefits for villagers. Studies of other urban villages in China have suggested that the village shareholding company option played an essential role in managing the village unit and coordinating governance tasks in an urban environment. 38 However, not all the villagers in Xiazhuang have been able to benefit from the innovative measures and the networks with the surrounding institutions. Many villagers lacked the skills and knowledge to integrate into urban life and employment. The quality of the infrastructure and of the villagers' houses was in fact far below the standards that were required by building regulations for safety and comfort. Although individual houses were refurbished and re-decorated, the long-term plan for the village is to move all the residents out and re-develop the village as a new urban area, similarly to Taihe's development.
In Taihe, the task of helping villagers to find employment opportunities rested primarily with the residents' committee. Their vulnerabilities are related to the lack of skills and knowledge needed for urban life and employment. In this case, longer term skills and training development provided in urban facilities may become more important than the short-term benefits gained from renting out space in Xiazhuang. For Xiazhuang village and many other peri-urban areas across the world, the fast-changing community landscape is the result of much larger scale land use changes. This can be caused by urban sprawl or by the loss of farming land in rural areas due to policy changes. At the same time, people migrate from both rural and urban areas to peripheral areas of cities where rents and land prices are lower. Therefore, there is a potential for rapid change involving population movement to areas with employment opportunities and suitable living conditions.

Conclusion
The aims and objectives of the research were to explore the events that affected the identities and development of the spaces in peri-urban areas in Kunming. By analysing two case studies, the authors have explored the relationship between the villagers and the surrounding environment, and changes in terms of cultural, social, political, and economic issues. The research also considered aspects of mixed urban and rural functions and how they contributed to the characteristics of the urban-rural interface in this region.
Based on the concept of 'admixture over replacement', Kipnis has argued, that the urbanisation presented here is a form of organic change where people are both increasingly cosmopolitan and nativist, and they actively recreate the past and reinvent tradition. 39 This is different from the existing studies of Chinese rural areas that focus on the increasing emptiness of the rural vil-lages and the decline of the traditional cultures and landscape. Aligning with Kipnis, the authors argue that both case studies demonstrate the so called 'urban and rural' architectural forms. Landscape and ways of life are increasingly becoming more 'urban and rural' orientated in the urban village areas, with peri-urban areas not only located at the edge of the cities but also in the centre of cities.
The case studies discussed here highlight the difficulties to efficiently manage spatial planning in these peri-urban zones and urban villages; this arises because the fluctuating patterns of the built environment and, consequently, the spatial planning methodologies. Taihe village and Xiazhuang village have both had long histories and rural roots, characterised by cultural features such as ancestor worship and strong patrilineages. As with other villages in China, those cultural and social features, together with the traditional social structure, helped to preserve the uniformity of the rural communities in premodern China. The policies of household registration and migration restriction policies set up between the 1950s and 90s closed off rural-urban migration and defined the differences between rural and urban characters. After the 1990s, China has largely relaxed the household registration; it is generally recognised that the rural populations which migrated to the cities are to a large extent 'urbanised'. The mobility of population between rural and urban areas has had significant impacts on the built environment, and has contributed to the formation of new types of settlement patterns and new urbanised landscapes with dual rural and urban characteristics.
The development of villages and small towns has led to the presence in the countryside of a large number of people who are disengaged from agriculture. In both case studies, the physical environment of the communities has already been to a large extent urbanised. Thus 'urbanisation' has become a re-appropriated and reinvented process that the villagers have undertaken or had placed upon them. In each case, it has had to incorporate the need to adapt to the fast-paced and high-consumption city lifestyle while at the same time trying to improve quality of life. The case studies demonstrated that the greater the residents' participation in the change process, the stronger the integrated relationship formed between the settlements and subsequent ecological and social systems.
Afridi, Li, and Ren have also highlighted that major and persistent income gaps between rural migrants and urban residents existed in large urban centres. 40 However, on an individual level, the villagers who want to integrate more into urban life and the mainstream economy are looking for ways to increase family income, improved transportation convenience, better employment prospects, and enhanced access to public facilities. The changed environment in both urban villages has provided various new opportunities for the villagers to integrate into the city life and preserve their own identities. Another group of residents involved in the village life in Xiazhuang are the students and artists groups. Their lifestyle and use of spaces highlighted the different requirements of these groups who are looking for new opportunities to develop their own identities in mixed urban and rural areas.
The two case studies of peri-urban villages presented in this paper include attributes that respond to the six assessment criteria defined by the Liveable City Assessment Standards as detailed in earlier. The economic prosperity, available resources, and the convenience in accessing facilities are concerns for both local villagers and tenants in Xiazhuang and in Taihe; however, looking forward, the most important issue for both communities is how to integrate into the mainstream (formal) economy and, at the same time, to enhance the localities of the places. 41 In his study of minority images and aspirations in China, Nicholas Tapp argued that the way in which historical cultural traditions deal with vital aspects of life, such as sickness and death, child-rearing, sexual desire, and so on, have been constantly re-appropriated during the recent migration processes from rural to urban systems in China. 42 The analysis of the two case studies presented in this paper suggests that peri-urban spaces in Southwest China retained their distinctiveness and certain rural characteristics when they were integrated in the city conglomerate through urbanisation processes, and that the relationships between the villagers and the surrounding built environment are constantly being re-appropriated and reinvented.
This paper explores the peri-urban developments in Southwest China in two forms. The first case illustrates that the morphology of the rural village space is retained, but the ownership of the land and properties are jointly shared among the villagers; in other words, there is an overlap of urban and rural systems in the peri-urban area. In the second case, the rural village has been rebuilt and transformed into an urban community, and villagers have been registered as part of the urban population. By studying these two peri-urban development projects, the authors highlight that peri-urban studies should consider two aspects that have been overlooked in existing studies. Firstly, in relation to practices, with the current escalation of climate crisis and income inequities, the general concern of access to shared resources, including farming land, common urban or rural space, is not only about the overlapping rural and urban districts in the area, but more about who is participating in making the peri-urban spaces, which should include various stakeholders claiming their collective role towards the definition of a right to the area. Secondly, in relation to geographic mapping, although there is a more scientific approach available for architectural design and urban planning based on the functions of the buildings and land, the mapping should reflect the perception and actions of the villagers and other local stakeholders that revealed the characteristics of the place. This goes beyond the conventional definition of areas based on agriculture or non-agriculture activities, or the number of the residents. It is, therefore, argued that the transformation of the landscape of the peri-urban areas in Southwest China has become more cosmopolitan and, at the same time, more locally focused. Clearly the situation is still evolving, but this paper provides key insights that can help future development be undertaken with better insights into possible consequences.