精明收缩视角下豫东农区镇区发展困境与收缩防治策略——以虞城县为例

Smart Shrinking: Dilemmas and Strategies for Avoiding Shrinking Town in Eastern Henan Plain Agricultural Area:A Case Study of Yucheng County

收缩不仅发生在城市,镇区也存在收缩问题。“上医治未病”,欠发地区内的镇区如何积极防治城镇收缩、化解发展困境是亟待研究的议题。本文以虞城县23个乡镇为例,总结了豫东平原农区镇区的空间特征,发现存在新增建设规模过大、房屋闲置、滞销物业过多、建筑烂尾现象突出、空间品质下行等城镇收缩问题;预测其收缩模式为“空间品质—人口规模—建设规模下行滞后”,具有“逆向收缩”的机制特征;指出豫东农区镇区的主要职能仍是零售服务,人口、产业集聚能力较弱;应借鉴精明收缩和精明增长的理念审慎进行空间扩张和开发建设,不宜将其作为就地城镇化的主阵地,以解决既有矛盾,规避即将大幅出现的小城镇收缩问题。最后,从发展理念、镇区建设、职能角色、公服设施和规划管理五个方面提出了收缩防治策略。

Shrinkage not only happens in cities,but also in small towns.The better plan will avoid the emerging shrinkage in the coming future as the better doctor can cure illness when it burgeoning.Shrinking cities exist all over the world,especially in developed countries.Smart shrinkage has been taken by the planners and city governors to address the knotty problems caused by shrinking.What can we learn from the smart shrinkage?Is there any possibility to avoid the potential shrinking cities and towns as China still have much space to advance its urbanization rate?China’s central agricultural areas,with high rural population density,is the typical shrinking region.It is urgent to guide the development of towns under the concept of smart shrinkage.Firstly,China’s urbanization policies encourage small towns,but they face many dilemmas with less resilience to confront shrinkage.Secondly,urbanization rate is lower than the average,which gives planners opportunities and time to tackle the shrinking problems.Besides,the rural families begin to purchase houses outside villages,and the nearby cities and towns also step into the period of expansion after a prolonged period of stagnation.Two reasons for paying more attention to the towns in central agricultural areas are as follows:1)there are relatively less studies of urban-rural planning focusing on the underdeveloped central region;2)there are still none studies in the discourse of smart shrinkage and shrinking cities from the perspective of solutions of avoiding shrinkage in advance.Eastern Henan Plain is a typical traditional agricultural area and a distinguished shrinking region where shrinkage ratio by registered and resident population is 20.73%.Yucheng is a county of Eastern Henan Plain with 25 towns and a population of 1.13 million.Reasons for selecting Yucheng as the case are as follows:1)its urbanization rate is lower(37.33%)and its shrinkage ratio is higher(26.32%)than the average rate of Eastern Henan Plain;2)more and more rural residents are willing to purchase houses outside instead of constructing in villages,therefore the nearby cities and towns have entered into a period of rapid expansion.3)after 2010,new shopping streets and commercial-residential buildings are built and shrinking problems have started to emerge;4)the towns have diverse peripherality.Firstly,we classify the towns into urban landscape and village landscape and find that the urban landscape only accounts for 32.64%which indicates that the scale of town is more approach to villages.There is no industrial park except one town and most of the enterprises are scattered alongside highways rather than concentrating in towns.Provincial highways contribute most to the towns.It is difficult to upgrade the low-end retailing because of the depopulation.The towns lack attractive force in terms of population and industry agglomeration,and thus new constructions are over supplied and most of them are vacant,unfinished and decaying.All of these contribute to the decline in the quality of street spaces.Secondly,by combing the detailed strategies of smart shrinkage,we classify them into three scopes:governance concept change,built environment optimization and development strategy improvement.The scale and its urban basic conditions are the two dominating factors that determine which strategy to be chosen.After all,backing to rightsizing is the main approach of smart shrinkage.Then,theoretical connotation of smart shrinkage is stated.Smart Shrinkage is a development concept that focus more on public welfare than on the growth,and held the view that small is acceptable and growth is not always the indictor of healthy cities,towns and villages.The reality of the cities and towns must be respected when planners making planning goals.Rightsizing can be achieved by shrinking in population,construction and land.This article predicts the shrinking model of towns in Yucheng,Eastern Henan Plain is the delay of“quality of space-population amount of construction”.It means that declining in the quality of space happens firstly,then population and then amount of construction.We define the shrinkage begins with depopulation,then others as“forward shrinkage”,and the one start with decaying space quality but not depopulation as“inverse shrinkage”.“Inverse shrinkage”happens in the period when the population still has potential to growth and the main reason resulting in the shrinkage is the oversupply of construction.Finally,the optimization strategies are proposed from five perspectives including development concept,construction,the role of town,public service facilities and planning management.This paper argues that the towns in the plain agricultural areas have weak population agglomeration ability.Urbanization in this area should adopt the concept of smart shrinkage and smart growth and prudently carry out development and construction.In addition,it is not suitable to carry out local urbanization in small towns,otherwise,the shrinkage of small towns is likely to occur in the future.