From Taobao Village to Emerging Garden Cities

From Taobao Village to Emerging Garden Cities

--the main content of New Urbanization from Below:

The Development and Governance of Taobao Villages in China

As the most active and appealing academic planning institution in China, UPSC has received support and friendship from a large number of domestic and international peers. To bear witness to this friendship, UPSC has dedicated a study, called the Fang Yuan Chamber, to house the books donated by these friends. At present, there are more than 700 books in the chamber, making it one of UPSC's most valuable assets.

Introduction

"Book Appreciation in Fang Yuan Chamber" is an activity to recommend books related to planning. Based on the books in Fang Yuan Chamber, the authors of them are invited to share their views and tell the stories behind in an online live broadcast. One of the authors invited for the first issue is Prof. Luo Zhendong, who shared his book -- New Urbanization from Below: The Development and Governance of Taobao Villages in China.

Author/Speaker: LUO Zhendong

Member of the Academic Committee on Master Planning

Professor, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Nanjing University

After my PhD, I spent a lot of time in urban development strategy research. I have researched a lot of villages and have a deep understanding of the problems of rural development in China. Since the first round of foreign investment in the 1990s, the process of large-scale local and allopatric urbanization started in rural areas. For a long time, the countryside has experienced a long-term loss of production factors.

In 2015, I was engaged in regional research and hoped to obtain data on the factor flow of "Double Eleven". I wrote an email to Mr. Jack Ma at that time, and his team replied that I was welcome to do research and join their “Flowing Water Project”。 However, when we actually started planning, Mr. Jack Ma announced that data was a strategic resource and therefore could not be given to me.  Fortunately, a colleague from the Ali Research Institute told me that he could take me to do research. As a result, in 2015, I went to "Taobao Village" for the first time.

When I conducted my first research, I was reminded of a paper written by my supervisor Professor Cui Gonghao in the 1990s: The Development Mechanism of Bottom-up Urbanization in China. In my opinion, Taobao Villages had strong motivation driving their bottom-up growth. After researching the countryside, I felt that it had a lot in common with the "bottom-up urbanization" 30 years ago, including the appearance of the countryside and the motivative force of the villagers. However, it has very unique features. Its industry was not simply processed by villagers, as it used to be. In these villages, residents first engaged in e-commerce, selling goods online. And at a certain point, when demand outstripped supply, they started to set up factories, thus promoting the progress of industrialization and urbanization.

The process of urbanization in the past generally developed from the primary industry to the secondary industry, and then to the tertiary industry. However, basically, this round of urbanization driven by e-commerce has developed from the primary industry to the tertiary industry, that is, online transactions. Afterwards, the secondary industry gradually emerged.

Currently, the latest Taobao Village data has been released. The total number of Taobao villages reached 5,425 in 2020. Since 2018, the annual increment of Taobao Village has been relatively stable. In other words, Taobao Village has gone through a period of fast growth and entered a period of steady one. Furthermore, there are nearly 600,000 administrative villages in China, while it is impossible for all of them to become Taobao villages. However, this phenomenon has brought a lot of influence to present rural development. From the overall distribution of Taobao village, it is mainly located in the eastern coastal areas: from Hebei in the north to Guangdong in the south; Taobao villages also exist in the central provinces like Henan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Anhui as well as the western provinces like Sichuan, Shaanxi, Guizhou and Yunnan. However, the gap between the east, the middle and the west is quite obvious.

Although the number of Taobao villages is limited, they have left a deep impression on me. For example, the subordinate village of Zhenping County （in Nanyang City, Henan Province） has been engaged in aquaculture since the 1980s, mainly selling goldfish. In the past, villagers sold by the barrel. Now they sell online one by one through live broadcast. During this process, the added value of goldfish has changed dramatically, so has the income.

Meanwhile, the countryside has many unique values, such as the environment with low-density. We are fascinated by the rural environment, including large-scale ecological space, historical farming, even traditional production methods, cooking methods, local dialects and folk art, etc. Nowadays, these contents are available on platforms like Tik Tok. Everyone is on the air and everything is on the air. Villages have more opportunities to show their charm.

At present, China's urban and rural planning is still lack of original theory, while theoretical innovation is surely challenging. When I was researching Taobao Village, the first thing that came to my mind was the bottom-up urbanization mentioned by my mentor, Professor Cui. Meanwhile, I am also thinking about the relationship between Taobao village and Garden City. Furthermore, I try to put Taobao Village in the theoretical system of "Space of Flows" and local space interaction described by Manuel Castells（1996）。 However, I found that his theory could not completely cover it. Castells describes the era when no village was highly digital. They did not have the same number of people engaged in Internet production as Taobao village in China.

Related research reports indicate that due to the popularization of mobile Internet, the rural people have been narrowing the digital gap with the cities through mobile phones. Today, when it comes to the Internet, the emphasis is not so much on the digital gap between urban and rural areas as on the generational divide between ages. Many older people are excluded from the mobile Internet era because they do not own smart phones. In contrast, when the gap between urban and rural areas is narrowing, the elements of urban and rural areas communicate information through the Internet. This promotes the generation of trading activities, which in turn brings about a series of interactions of elements.

When young people in the countryside began to produce and live through new information tools and methods, the differences between urban and rural areas have been greatly eliminated. At the same time, the consistency of the carrier （like smart phones） for urban and rural residents to satisfy their spiritual and material lives has also achieved urban and rural unity to some extent. When this phenomenon occurred, I realized that the relationship between urban and rural areas was undergoing tremendous changes, and the corresponding theories needed to be changed. The first thing That came to my mind was the Garden City theory. Garden City is a critical theory in the field of urban planning. It is also an essential theory to create a beautiful human settlement. Nowadays, is it possible to realize it?

In my opinion, there is a clear scale paradox in the theory of Garden city. That is: the scale effect of agglomeration and the environmental effect of dispersion cannot be realized simultaneously in physical space. To produce scale effect, a large number of factors must be gathered, so the intensity and density of urban development must be higher, which means more contacts and trading opportunities. As a result, people are more inclined to big cities for more trading opportunities.

If the development intensity, scale and density are kept at a high level, then the environmental effect will surely be reduced. Therefore, if the intensity and density of development are to be controlled and the characteristics of a rural city are maintained, high density is bound to be lost and it is challenging to form scale effect. Howard recognized the economies of scale brought about by the agglomeration of large cities, while he hoped that the Garden City could obtain rural characteristics. Therefore, he considered 30,000 people as the basic scale, that meant, while ensuring a certain density, each person could own sufficient space.

The problem is that there would be limited job opportunities in such garden cities. Howard also realized that a single rural city could not undertake many functions, let alone achieve scale effect. To cope with it, he proposed the concept of social cities, which was similar to so-called urban agglomerations or clusters of cities. Such a cluster of cities was believed to solve the scale paradox of a single city through the different division of labor in each. This might be the best way that could be thought of in an era when there is no virtual space （Internet space）。 In the past, the urban agglomeration planning we advocated also progressed along this path.

What happens when Howard and Castells’s theories meet? The physical space cannot simultaneously achieve the scale effect of agglomeration and the decentralized environmental effect. But can it be achieved through the intervention of space of flows? The agglomeration of space of flow does not necessarily bring about more physical space. Taking village Internet celebrity Li Ziqi as an example. Although her videos are popular both in China and abroad, the village she lives in has not changed dramatically in form. Meanwhile, many Taobao villages engaged in the production of agricultural products and service products will not necessarily bring about the physical agglomeration. The reason is that the agglomeration of entities is generally related to industrialization. In many cases, only with large-scale industrial production can urbanization be expanded. The expansion of space of flows will not necessarily bring about the agglomeration of physical space, but it can bring about stronger virtual agglomeration and more employment opportunities. The expansion of space of flows will not necessarily lead to the agglomeration of physical space, but it can enhance the agglomeration of virtual space. And this usually means more job opportunities.

I cross-combine this clustering and dispersion with the two keywords of entity and virtual. Based on this, I divided cities and towns into four types, thus generating a new understanding of urban and rural space. For example, the traditional countryside has no space of flow or virtual agglomeration. If there are virtual agglomerations, such as many Taobao villages, these agglomeration spaces have not changed the appearance and density of the countryside. On the contrary, they become village of flows that I define. Nowadays, a large number of Taobao villages could be classified into this category, including villages formed by many famous tourist attractions. The folk customs and tourism service products provided by these villages will not necessarily bring about the agglomeration of physical space as well.

Taking cities as the object, a traditional city could be regarded as the agglomeration of physical space if it does not enter into the global industrial division of labor. However, some large cities, such as Hangzhou and Shanghai, have entered into the global industrial division of labor, which leads to the convergence of more factor flows in them to form hubs. As a result, they could be regarded as city of flows. In the past, villages could gradually develop into towns after the accumulation of production factors. Nowadays, however, villages could be transformed into villages of flows, rather than towns and cities. This process could be caused by the direct leap from the primary industry to the tertiary industry, while bypassing the development of the secondary industry. As mentioned above, the secondary industry may rise again when the tertiary industry has developed to a certain extent in villages. After that, village of flows may further acquire physical spatial agglomeration, or urbanization to become a city of flow. Furthermore, traditional towns may also gather more elements to form a cluster of towns of flow. Therefore, urbanization may have a new explanation in the context of the mobile Internet era.

From this perspective, some Taobao villages have the potential to become newly garden cities. These villages of flows are highly non-agricultural and have good employment prospects. But the living environment needs to be enhanced. In this regard, I preliminarily put forward the concept of “E-garden City”， namely the garden city of e-commerce.

Based on the research on the development of Taobao Village, I preliminarily forecast the present and future changes of the living space. Every industrial revolution will bring about tremendous changes in the form of urban and rural space. I believe that in the fourth industrial revolution represented by mobile Internet, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, various types of human settlements will also be undergoing tremendous changes.

The original text of the report is in Chinese. According to the contents of the report, it is sorted out and posted on the official WeChat of UPSC. All figures are from the original text. Some of the contents have been adjusted in translation.