Metropolis of Micro-polarities: the implication of social and spatial resilience in reframing Shanghai Desakota Region

Questions of increasing socioeconomic inequality and social polarization in Chinese cities and the rural-urban dual structure in the transitional area are under debate in contemporary urban studies.
Contemporary urban development processes in Shanghai have placed a greater emphasis upon the goals of enhanced economic efficiency, rapid economic growth, and an increasing role for markets in the circulation of goods, services, capital and wage labour.
These efforts have not only spatial dimensions built in, but also clear implications for spatial development. This rapid urbanization has causes sub-health and unchanging state of urban-rural dual structure.
Accelerated urban growth has led to an increasing concentration of economic functions on the outskirts of the city and housing construction in new suburban areas and satellite towns. Compounding this process of spatial expansion is the large influx of rural–urban migrants, who have concentrated primarily in suburbs just outside the urban core. Hence, in the urban fringe there is an increasing juxtaposition of high-tech zones, new commercial housing projects, resettlement housing for central-city residents, migrant communities, and rural villages. As the mutual penetration area between the core area of cities and suburbs and the most intense areas of urbanization, city outskirts are the natural mapping of urban expansion on agricultural land. The joint of urban and rural is characteristic of dual properties, namely naturalness of the suburbs and the transition. As a result, urban and rural, traditional and modern settlement systems co-exist in close proximity due to a regional phenomenon of hybrid spatial condition named desakota by geographer Terry McGee.
The research investigate Shanghai Desakota hybridisation and lead the way in urban development by highlighting infrastructures of both lsocial and spatial resilience, through which landscape can be reorganized as as a medium and as the connecting link between the land, the people and goods. YRD Desakota metropolitan region represents an important case where the network of micro-polarites plays a strategic role.