| This study deals with the internal structure of four Chinese cities in the 1920's and 1930's, Peking, Nanking, Shanghai and Tienstsin. When possible, comparisons are made between the early twentieth century and the nineteenth century. The purpose is to differentiate between transitional elements influenced by modern technology and elements indigenous to premodern or at least late imperial Chinese cities. The sources are mainly documentary materials, including official population reports, reports of social, economic and land surveys, tourist guides, yearbooks, and local gazetters and city maps. These data are transformed into social maps, which form the foundation for the analysis of land use patterns and demographic distributions.;The rapid population growth and the expansion of the built-up area of these four cities in the early twentieth century were peculiar in Chinese history. However, the expansion of their built-up area was slower than the growth of their population, and their population were still concentrated overwhelmingly in a small urbanized area with a radius 3 miles or less. Despite industrialization and/or other modern influences, these cities lacked some infrastructures for faster urban expansion, such as economic prosperity, a growing middle class, decentralization of handicrafts and industries, and differentiation between work place and residence. The poor internal transportation and the close relation between work place and residence hindered the decentralization of middle and upper class people. The large amount of immigrants into the city on the one hand resulted in increasing congestion of living space in the densely populated areas and on the other hand led to large squatter areas on the urban fringes.;Two sets of issues are dealt with in this study: the internal growth of the city and its land use pattern. In the discussion of urban growth, I have placed the emphases on the pattern of the population distribution and the expansion of the built-up area. As to urban land use, I deal with patterns of different land uses, including governmental and other public land uses, commercial and industrial land uses, and residential patterns, with interrelations between different land uses, and with functional differentiation of urban land. |
