“Urban-Rural Integration” in the Earthquake Zone: Sichuan's Post-Disaster Reconstruction and the Expansion of the Chengdu Metropole

One of the more recent movements in China’s policy for periurban planning and development is the pursuit of “town and country integration” (cheng xiang yi ti hua). The officially reframed approach to planning suggests possibilities for the official reconsideration of developmental practice, but entrenched conditions of governance, land, environmental and developmental policy, and the planning profession itself constrain these possibilities. Perhaps no other context in China illustrates these constraints more dramatically than the reconstruction effort underway in Sichuan following the earthquake of May 12, 2008. Cultural, environmental and economic differences among settlements in the earthquake zone vary widely, and local and national leaders frequently mention the opportunity the recovery presents for innovative and sustainable development, but the “cataclysmic” nature of reconstruction investment, and the extremely rapid and construction-dominated approach to recovery has prevented planners from considering local conditions or alternative approaches. If the official earthquake response has served to propel urbanization along preexisting trajectories, local geographical, historical and cultural conditions nevertheless assert themselves, even if informally. The uniquely dense, dispersed and agriculturally productive Chengdu Plain has already shaped a national discourse on urban-rural relations. The expansion of Chengdu’s urban region into the narrow valleys and minority ethnic settlements across the Longmen Mountains presents new and unpredictable challenges for considering how city and country are related.