Political ecologies of urban–rural conservation planning and resettlement

This chapter demonstrates how urban-rural conservation planning facilitates the territorialization of peri-urban land by municipal governments. I draw on a political ecology framework to detail what I call ‘ecological territorialization’. Ecological territorialization, in municipal regions, entails urban-rural conservation planning practices, multi-functional land zoning, and state-private partnerships, which are crucial to extending municipal power over rural land and populations. These processes spur myriad and uneven socio-economic trajectories for peri-urban ecological migrants who undergo uneven resettlement processes and livelihood transitions. In contemporary China, urban-rural conservation planning is key to producing frontiers of land-based accumulation and extending local state control across the peri-urban fringe. As ecological territorialization extends the reach of the local state, it simultaneously reorients rural people’s relationships to land, labor and housing in ways contingent on spatiotemporal politics of land and housing valuation, compensation and rural social organization.