Self-organization in planned Danwei and Dayuan: A case study of the transitional Houzaimen neighborhood of Nanjing in urban China

Abstract

[EN] The dualism of top-down planning versus self-organization has dominated the paradigm on the evolvement of urban morphology. However, the coexistence of the both can be observed in different scale phenomena, such as the locality of city, states, or even global contexts. In the network of the global economy, urban places as spatial effects of globalization result from negotiations between international capitals and local powers. At the same time, the transitional city form also responds to changing regulations under the state socio-economic regime. Due to economic competitiveness, the entrepreneurial turn in the municipal governance reflects the role shift of local authorities from passive regulation operators to active agents for investment attractiveness and high fiscal incomes. Those changes have particular impacts on city planning while self-organization emerges in urban places. Thus, we study the socioeconomic strata within contemporary urban China's territories to discover dynamics of urban morphology, interacting factors and quantitative signatures for self-orgtanization apart from top-down interventions and finally to reveal the place-shaping mechanism. In the well-reserved Houzaimen neighborhood of Nanjing, the extremely close system-danwei and dayuan has gradually changed into the new community-xiaoqu. By site surveys and measurement approaches, the recognized pattern in residential ownerships, the allocation of commercial activities, accessibility and connectivity of residential areas, and fractal distributions in urban fabrics can help to compare self-organizing xiaoqu with planned dayuan for systematic openness and complexity towards sustainability. Meanwhile, dimension spectrum of the fractal structure reveals the mechanism of city evolvement. The result shows the open system fostering self-organization has higher value of fractal dimensions than the segregated one, while it may not necessarily be highly connected small-world networks. In addition, the identical fractal structure discovered in dayuan proves selforganization can emerge from the planned system