Villages in the City: Patterns of Urbanization in the Pearl River Delta, Dakar, and Zanzibar

The second chapter centers on patterns , specifically the geographic land-use and housing patterns common to rapid urbanization that overtakes the surrounding countryside. The chapter uses the Chinese concept of chengzhongcun , or urbanized village, along with the related concepts of chengbiancun and chengwaicun , villages on the city-edge and in the suburbs, and Chinese scholarship analyzing what happens to them in the PRD. The chapter applies these ideas to other similarly rapid urban transformations in Dakar and Zanzibar, with references to the comparability in other cities of the book. The purpose is to work toward conceptualizing from outside global North frameworks when looking at land-use patterns in urbanization. If one seeks to understand the patterns of 21 st century planetary urbanization, one ought to look at the places where those patterns are most rapidly transforming the landscape and find the language there that is used to describe and analyze them. This chapter is a small experiment in doing so.