Shunde is located in another of China’s most prosperous areas
- the Pearl River Delta (PRD), to the south of Guangzhou and
north-west ofHongKong (Fig. 2).It covers a landarea of 806.15 km2,
and the population reached 2.47 million in 2012. It used to be an independent county, but was annexed to Foshan municipality in
2003, becoming one of its districts. Before 2003, it ranked number
1 of 100 top counties for four years.
This research selects Jiangyin and Shunde as cases based on the
following reasons: (1) both of them are typical peri-urban areas in
the developed areas of China; (2) they share some similarities in
economic growth, but there are many differences in the trajectory
of development and land policies which can enrich our understanding
of the diversity of peri-urban areas