Understanding the impact of economic migrants and landless farmers on mass-produced housing and community space in China

As a consequence of the rapid, government-led and globally fuelled urban develop-ment that is occurring within China, an unplanned form of urbanization is emerging,whereby landless farmers and economic migrants are resettling and occupying bothpublic space and housing in ways that deviate from the community development plan.The paper will use both historical and contemporary urban theory, together with acase study of Zhangjiing in Suzhou Industrial Park, China as means of critiquing andlearning from these consequences and the planning and policy instruments in place. Thecase of Zhangjing can be critically reviewed in the context of Christopher Alexander’sargument that when a new urban development is created which is modelled or pre-dicated on a tree structure to replace the semi-lattice that was there before, the city takesa step towards dissociating itself from its geographical and cultural context