Research Into The Types And Characteristics Of Migrants' Settlement In “urban Villages” In Wuhan

Since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy, the urbanization in China has been speeded up greatly. A large number of migrants flood into cities, participating in many production and construction activities, which contributes to the development of urban society and economy. However, because of the financial burden and some other reasons, local governments cannot offer migrants sufficient and suitable houses, and “urban villages” become the main inhabitation area of migrants owing to its sufficient private houses and low living cost. However, “urban villages” also bring many troubles to cities because of its environment and security problems. So governments begin to take actions to reconstruct “urban villages”, and in this process, migrants are forced to move out of “urban villages” and lost their settlements in cities.In this context, this thesis conducted a research into “urban villages” in Wuhan, investigated the types and characteristics of migrants' settlement in “urban villages”, and explored migrants' residence requirements and preferences, which is supposed to offer valuable suggestions and guidance to the reconstruction and development of “urban villages” in Wuhan.This thesis contains the following chapters. The research background and the general research framework are introduced in Chapter One. Chapter Two discusses the related research work on “urban villages” and the settlement of migrants, which is also the theory foundation of this thesis. And according to the definition of settlement, Chapter Three classifies and summarizes the settlement styles of migrants in “urban villages” from two aspects: one is the subject of the settlement, such as the population organization, the settlement mechanism, and the settlement activities; the other is the container of the settlement, namely, the settlement space. Chapter Four introduces the general situation of “urban villages” and migrants in Wuhan, and then conducts a survey into the settlement styles of migrants in different-stage “urban villages”. This thesis also selects four typical settlement styles of migrants to take a deep research into them, which is presented in Chapter Five. Based on the research above, development strategies for “urban villages” are also proposed from the perspective of floating population in Chapter Six. Finally, Chapter Seven presents the conclusions and limitations of this research, and also discusses the possible future research work about “urban villages” and migrant.