320 / 2019-02-20 04:33:38

Mapping Urban Farming in Chinese Cities: Depicting a social phenomenon via on-line news

Self-organized Urban Farming,Bottom-up Urbanization,On-line news Aggregated Data,Data Mining,Mapping and Visualization

全体主题 > Spatial data collection, Analysis, and Visualization

Context: Why Farming on Urban land
Historically, China has largely been an agrarian nation which in recent years has been undergoing rapid urbanization. Hundreds of new cities have been built and thousands of old ones have expanded, most of which come to occupy agricultural lands due to their easy access and better geographical conditions. Consequently, villagers who have been farming on these lands for generations have suddenly become urban citizens, facing an entirely new life-style which they had never encountered before. What’s more, public concerns about such issues as food security, a lack of social activities for aging populations, as well as a general lack of proper management of public green spaces in some residential communities have driven residents to take matters into their own hands, developing a number of bottom-up, self-organized actions.
One particularly notable action is urban farming, which is the focus of this project. More specifically, this project investigates aging peoples’ self-organized farming activities in Chinese urban areas. Fueled by data mining techniques, my objective here is to depict such activities via an integrated map using data from both traditional sources as well as recent online news posts at the national scale.

Source of Data
Farming in public green spaces in Chinese cities has become a common phenomenon in recent years. Numerous reports can be found on the Internet as well as citizens on the ground. Traditionally, researchers have tended to rely on remote sensing imagery, government statistics data, and open-access source maps to trace the footprint of urbanization in China. However, these sources have a limited capacity to uncover the bottom-up activities everyday life at broad scale. On the other, field survey approach takes much more efforts to investigate if covering entire nation. As such, this project is draws on the wealth of Internet resources as well as data mining techniques which have grown tremendously in the past two decades in order to document the emergence of these bottom-up processes of urbanization at the national scale.
The project relies on public news posted on Internet newspapers. In 2000 when the Chinese version of Google (“Baidu”) was established, Internet news started to become part of people’s lives—indeed, one of the major sources for knowing what was going on around the country. This trend has continued to today, with mobile Internet technologies dominating recently. In the context of this project, news sources depicting the farming activities in urban green spaces such as public green spaces in gated residential communities (Xiao Qu in Chinese characters) are extracted over a time range from 2000 to 2010, with such information also being geo-referenced.
The main key words and phrases utilized for searches and data extraction include “gated residential community” (小区 or Xiao Qu) and “Farming” (种地 or Zhong Di). From these search terms alone, 241 news articles were found from 2000 to 2010. From this data, the comments and involvement of aging people who are often key actors in these bottom-up urban farming activities are recorded and represented on a map, respectively. The outcome is a form of integrated heat map describing the frequency and level of involvement of urban farming activities associated with these older people from 2000 to 2010.
In addition to the above, previous analyses of population density by official statistics, and urban construction by research initiatives, are retraced to overlap with aggregated maps of urban farming activities in China. The aging population is calculated from the official publication Historical China County Population Census Data with GIS Maps (1953-2000) and transformation data of the overall urban footprint is derived from the scholarly paper “China’s urban expansion from 1990 to 2010 determined with satellite remote sensing” by Wang. This previous research data serves as a context map to convey the trajectory of urbanization, aging, and farmland degradation altogether from 1990 to 2010.

Implication in urban planning and management
There are two main objectives of the project. The first is to document the previously undocumented phenomenon of urban agriculture at a national scale using text-based data extraction approaches to inform the public of on-going urbanization as well as the emerging bottom-up reaction of city residents in China. Second, the project attempts to use the aggregate of unique online resources derived from search engines to build an original data source with the aim of opening such data to the public.