A new short film featured at Citylab captures the striking scenes of skyscrapers encroaching on farmers amid China’s rapid urbanization.
This is what urban sprawl looks like in many south and east Asian cities, where splintering urbanism has had profound effects on things like water access in rural communities that are suddenly finding themselves pushed off their land as they morph into village-cities.
Caught in a limbo between past and future, rural and urban, these peri-urban villages (PUVs) face a multitude of challenges that researchers, policymakers and planners need to address in order to achieve environmental and social justice for affected communities as cities continue to grow.