By looking into the urbanization process in Yinjiang for the past decades (especially the last 15 years), this article discusses the ongoing transformations happening at a township and village level through the lens of housing and planning.
Housing, which focuses on the regeneration within the territory of the town municipality, includes both of the newly built housing types initiated by local government and the real estate property developments driven by private capitals. The new housing types mentioned above refer to new villages that are five to six stories high to replace the existing natural villages, new residence built to accommodate local villagers who are over 23 years old but not able to afford an individual housing unit, and caring centers for elder villagers. These are government led projects aiming to level up housing standards of local residents. On the other hand are the commercial projects, their original strategy and actual sale conditions are also compared to illustrate the willingness or ability of the locals to buy so that the change of the structure of local housing system brought by real estate projects is highlighted.
Yinjiang is at the same time an experimental spot for the coordination of different types of planning, such as strategy planning, spatial planning and land planning. The first daft of a combined planning will come out soon and will provide necessary empirical material for this research.